One day I decided to expand my Google Maps brewery searches of the region to a larger radius to see just what I could find. I went to the home page of Roslyn Brewing Company and saw that they have a root beer, No. 9 Root Beer to be exact. I was both elated and shocked. Roslyn is five minutes off of the freeway on the way to my parents’ house. I’ve driven past there dozens of times in the past few years and never knew there was gourmet root beer just waiting for me to try. And of course it would be another five months or so before I went to visit my parents again so I couldn’t try it right away. Roslyn itself is a tiny little town that used to be a coal mining town, a rarity in Washington State. It’s all old fashioned looking and their brewery’s taproom only has six stools. Since no minors (only miners?) are permitted, I had to leave the kids outside with a promise that I’d bring the root beer out to them after my review. Sadly this has nothing to do with the Beatles, but rather is named after coal mine No. 9 which supplied coal to the trains going over Snoqualmie Pass.
The Body is dark and minty yet not full. There’s licorice and it’s slightly sour. There’s not really any Bite, which is odd for this old fashioned variety. There wasn’t really any Head on it either. The Aftertaste is weak with a little bit of wintergreen.
So this isn’t really good. It’s not my favorite variety of root beer, and is poor in its genre. There really isn’t anything to see in the town other than a tiny museum and some old fashioned buildings, so unless your route takes you past there, I wouldn’t recommend a trip just to try it.
The Roslyn Brewing Company and Tap Room
The No. 9 Root Beer tap.
The fine city of Roslyn. Not really anything there.
I was trawling through Google Maps trying to find breweries in the greater Puget Sound area and I discovered that BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse not only had their own draft root beer, but a location in Redmond where I live. How’d I miss that? I’ve been gallivanting across the nation in search new brews and there was one right in my own backyard? In my defense, it only opened a few months before I discovered it so it’s not like I missed it for that long. It was only two weeks after the discovery that I got the whole family there for dinner on a Saturday night. The place was very, very crowded and busy. I hoped it was worth the wait. 
This past Friday my parents were visiting for the Labor Day weekend. I decided that we should all take a ferry ride to Bremerton because it is an awesome ride. The question arose of what to do when we got there and well, I figured we’d go and get some root beer and have lunch. I decided to check if there was any new place that I’d missed and the lovely Google Maps showed Slaughter County Brewing Company in Port Orchard. I called them and asked if they made their own root beer and they said that they did. Therefore, that’s where we went for lunch. The whole place is very pirate themed, with skulls and skeletons and cannons and ships and whatnot. It’s got personality like few places ever do. They run on a skeleton crew, so you order at the bar and then they bring it up to you. We got six root beers, one for each of us, and then I got to reviewing.
