This was renamed to Good and D’Lish Root Beer sometime after I initially reviewed it. It was the first new root beer I found when I moved back to Seattle for grad school. I found it at the local Wallgreens and was very pleased to do so. I checked with the manager and found out that it was their premium store brand. They also have a Walgreens root beer in plastic. That’s something I’d like to see more of. Stores with their own gourmet root beer lines in addition to their cheap swill, or maybe just eliminate the cheap stuff all together like H-E-B and have your brand be something awesome. What’s cool about this is that it’s a 16 ounce bottle with a unique shape and one of those resealable caps. You don’t see those often on glass bottled sodas. They boast on the bottle that they don’t use any HFCS but they also don’t use pure cane sugar either, so it’s sort of a halfway effort for people who care about that sort of thing.
The Body is sweet and creamy though with a tad too much licorice. The Bite is nice and spicy. The Head is short, with a medium froth, which is rather disappointing. The Aftertaste is dark and almost candyish.
This is good, but the licorice is a little too strong for my tastes. Also the Head is too weak, so sorry Deerfield, no Seal for you. However, for a store brand this is pretty near top notch. See how it rates against other root beers.
I’d known about this for a long time, but I never seem to head down to Portland ever. I tried calling them once, but they didn’t want to ship anything up to me. One day I was emailing with a nice chap named Aaron who wanted to know about good draft brews in between Seattle and Portland, as he journeys between the two frequently. I told him all of the one’s I know and then asked if he could pick me up some of this. He delivered it to The Root Beer Store in Puyallup and then I had to wait for the owner to bring it to their Redmond store so I could pick it up during lunch and then bike with it back to Bothell. Evidently the bottles traveled some 1,400 miles before they even ended up in Puyallup. I think it’s the most complicated trade I’ve ever hashed out. Now for the elephant in the room, the label, or rather, the lack thereof. I don’t know why they don’t label it. I asked them as much when I called. They were adamant that they wouldn’t, no matter how I pleaded with them. It must be a Portlandian thing or something like that. I can’t see how this benefits them at all, but people from that area are largely inscrutable. My usual requirement for a bottled root beer is that it has to have a label. I’ll make an exception this once and only once. The non-labeled root beer is Oregon City Soda Company. As for ingredients and nutritional info, who knows … Now that I think about it I’m not actually sure that’s legal.
This root beer has an interesting gimmick. Supposedly the recipe was discovered by a one Joe Marshall as he futilely looked for the Santa Fe Trail in 1848. According to his “journal” after three days of searching he met some people who gave him food and a brew made from roots and herbs called “root beer.” He liked it so much he gave up looking for the trail and settled there, evidently. Joe was great-great grandfather of Shelly Schierman, who is an owner of the Louisburg Cider Mill and Lost Trail Soda Co. which happens to be in Kansas, so they didn’t really move far from where Great GrandPappy got lost. Joe seemed to have written the recipe down in his journal, but no one really cared for the next 150 odd years when Shelly started making it. The label expectedly features a cowboy on a horse looking quite lost. 