Draft and Keg Root Beers – Eric’s Gourmet Root Beer Blog

Restoration Pizza Root Beer

Nov 012023

Back in August I found myself in Albuquerque for the final end of my project. If you’ve been following you’ll know that I’ve found several brews down there but I had hopes I could find another one. I searched for a couple of days, reaching out to every brewery and distillery I could find online, but no luck, so by Wednesday I’d given up on root beer and we decided to hit our favorite pizza join, Restoration Pizza. If you can’t get a new root beer, at least you can get an amazing pizza with green chile. When the waitress asked what we wanted to drink, we asked what kind of root beer they served. She informed us that they make their own. Well that blew me away. How’d I missed that? They’d just started making it a mere two months before. How serendipitous for me. Now I could have my pizza and my root beer too. The question is, how was it?

The Body is weak, not very sweet nor creamy and a little bitter wintergreen. The Bite is mild but not smooth. It could use more spice. The Head is short and foams away by the time they bring it out to you. The Aftertaste is milde and sort of bitter. There’s a little bit of caramel flavor to it though.

Yeah, this is not really a very good root beer at all. Hopefully they are still trying to improve their recipe because it does need some work. Their pizza is still amazing so I definitely recommend visiting, but maybe skip this, unless they make it better.

Snow Eagle Brewing & Grill Homemade Root Beer

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Sep 062023

In June I took a lovely long road trip with the family to Idaho. On the way back we went through Idaho falls and I had discovered this place the day before while scoping out if there was anything worth seeing near the supercharger. Snow Eagle Brewing is about a 15 minute walk along the Snake River park from the charger, right across from the scenic Idaho Falls themselves. Their website is very scant on details on their history, but they brew beer and have food and most importantly, brew their own root beer. Their glasses feature a samurai, which is a bit odd for Idaho, but Idaho Falls has a sister city in Japan, Tokai-Mura, so I guess they’re just taking that friendship to a new level.

It has a dark, old fashioned Body with a lot of licorice, some vanilla, and a little wintergreen. There’s too much licorice and it isn’t very sweet. The Bite is mild with a distict lack of spices for a dark, old fashioned brew. The Head is not there, not there at all. No foam that I could see. Very sad. The Aftertaste is licorice with hints of vanilla and a bitter wintergreen finish.

Sadly, this isn’t a particularly great root beer, it has too much licorice and just falls flat (both figuratively and literally) in every other category. It was a beautiful walk to see it, but I think I’d rather not walk near as far and check out some of the sites along the way next time. I have no idea how their food tastes because I didn’t get any, but it probably is decent. So if you find yourself craving a root beer while admiring the Idaho Falls, this will probably leave you disappointed, but it is at least, there.

The Snow Eagle taps. Root Beer on top, as it should be.

Wienerpeg Brewed Root Beer

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Jun 072023

Last month I was up in Winnipeg for the first time in my life. I was there for DERMS, because what else would I be doing? I could just be road tripping, it’s not actually that far from home, but I wasn’t road tripping. Anyways, after doing my DERMS thing my coworker and I walked down to The Forks to see the sites. I love revitalized areas like that, where parks and shops and restaurants are in old brick and stone buildings built in centuries past. One of those restaurants is Wienerpeg, a most fabulously named hot dog place. Everyone who hears the name laughs, and with reason. It is pretty funny. I had made this restaurant our target since I knew that they also made a house brewed root beer, in addition to gourmet hot dogs and poutine. Which would be perfect for International Poutine Day, the day we were there. After checking out the shops we grabbed our order and went to review.

The Body is light and herbal with a prominent honey and sarsaparilla flavor. It’s one of those rare, herb tea root beer profiles which you wouldn’t recognize as root beer if you were blindfolded. The Bite has decent spice with okay carbonation. The Head is medium-short, and fizzes away a little too quickly. The Aftertaste is mild honey and herbs, which is quite pleasant but quite not like archtypical root beer.

An herb tea style root beer. I haven’t had one of those in awhile. I’m still not convinced that this a valid form of root beer, just too far outside of what you’d expect. I dare anyone to take a blind taste and say that such a brew is in fact a root beer, or what they expect a root beer to taste like. Anyways, it is a bit tasty and pleasant to drink and goes well with the hotdogs. I had their signature Wienerpeg one with some pulled pork poutine, that was quite excellent. This place is definitely worth a visit for the food.

My Wienerpeg hotdog, with cheese curds, dill and grilled onions, and a pulled pork poutine

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