So my good buddy from the Root Beer Trackers decided he was going to take a holiday root beer road trip to my neck of the woods. In preparation he called 260+ breweries throughout the state to see if they had root beer. Now that’s devotion, and also really ambitious. I told him if he found a new one for me one close by that I’d meet him there and we could try it together. And he found Geaux Brewing. Just 15 minutes south of me in Bellevue! It’s a new brewery, only opening three years ago, after I’d made a thorough sweep of the area, so it was an excusable oversight on my part. The Brewery itself is very small and is an island of devotion to the New Orleans Saints. In Seahawks territory. That’s a bold move, and also why it’s called Geaux as in ‘Geaux Saints’ which I understand is all trying be look French and all, but because I actually speak French, I find kind of annoying. But the people there were all very friendly and they even have their own canning machine to sell you 24 ounce cans because they don’t do growlers for some reason. It was extra cool to meet another reviewer and share a pint, but the root beer itself, well…
The Body is light and not very sweet. There’s a little wintergreen in there and some standard root beer flavors. The Bite is very mild, almost no spices at all. The Head is completely non-existent, which is very depressing. The Aftertaste is light wintergreen that finishes a tad sour.
So, yeah, um, not really very good. I mean, it’s not horrible or gag inducing but definitely not something I’d ever go drink again. Which I guess is good as I won’t have to awkwardly go into an enclave of Saints fans on game day I suppose. Oh well, as I told the Tracker, it’s the bad root beers that help us truly appreciate the good ones.
The inside of the tap room with some of its Saints paraphernalia.
The taps and the canning machine.
So last weekend my family and I went up to Bellingham for an IEEE PES event at the Spark Museum of Electrical Invention. It was really cool (for a nerdy engineer like myself). And I even won a raffle to get to stand in a big Faraday cage and get blasted by a 4,000,000 V Tesla coil. Fun times. And wouldn’t you know, there’s another brewery in Bellingham that makes their own root beer. Aslan Brewing Company was conceived in 2012 and became a full brewpub a year later in 2013. Their philosophy is on locally sourced and organic ingredients with minimal environmental impact. They make a ginger beer along with Rachelle’s Root Beer. I should have asked who Rachelle is because the website says nothing about her but she is listed on the menu so I’ve dutifully named this after her. When I showed up with my family, everyone was hungry and there was a long wait. The place was crowded and it was pouring rain. I decided to just get a pint of this for review and then go somewhere a bit quieter for dinner. 
Mammoth is a fancy sandwich shop in the Eastlake neighborhood in Seattle. Their sandwiches are all ice age-y named things like Saber Tooth, Predator, Dodo, Neaderthal, and whatnot. In addition to their most epic sandwiches, they brew several flavors of house sodas to compliment the many other beers they carry on tap. A coworker of mine told me that they had their own root beer so of course I wasted little time in dropping by. I went for lunch with said coworker and another to give it a try. We missed the bus so we took a Lyft, and the coworker in the front seat kept confusing the driver by pointing things out to us to look at. Though that wasn’t anywhere near as entertaining as our ride back on the bus, where my complaining about massive memory allocated to “miscellaneous files” causing a memory shortage in my Samsung phone elicited some dubious advice from a fellow passenger, a woman of questionable sanity, who insisted I just needed to go to the trash folder and empty it, just like in her Windows phone … she even tried to show me how to do it. But this was superseded when we exited the bus and saw a man trying to remove the anti-theft cap from a vodka bottle by banging it repeatedly against a newspaper vending machine in the middle of a busy sidewalk. I guess he really needed a shot. Both of my coworkers were quite amused at my ordering, emphatically stating there could be no ice and I wanted it with lots of foam, but servers complied. All told, the trip was an amazing success even without the sandwiches and root beer, but that root beer would have been worth it in the most boring of trips.
