The Body has a very strong wintergreen flavor in the old fashioned style. There’s a bit of vanilla and a lot of spice. The Bite is sharp, which seems to be their goal. The Head is quite short, but it is there. The Aftertaste is bitter. Too much wintergreen so it ends quite bitter indeed.
Wow, a lot of Bite, but very bitter for a root beer. Maybe beer drinkers would appreciate that but I certainly did not. This isn’t really a brew I’d ever drink, not even with pizza. Which sadly, we didn’t have time to try due to tight schedule constraints. Maybe I’ll go back there some day, probably not, but at least it looks really cool.
On New Year’s Day the weather was beautiful and it hadn’t snowed for a few days so I thought I’d take a scenic drive with the family. I figured something the drove along the Mississippi River would be nice, and I knew that in the city of Red Wing, there was a brewery that also made their own root beer. So after a nice drive on the Wisconsin side of the river, we found ourselves at the little Red Wing Brewery. The city of Red Wing actually has a storied past with breweries, but they all were closed by the 1950s. The Red Wing Brewery is the first to open there since 1951. Now the root beer is called Good Old Zimmie’s and this time I actually had the presence of mind to ask why it was called this. I was told that they looked through the long history of Red Wing beers and chose from those names. Good Old Zimmie’s was the name of some old brew. Go figure. 
Last week I was in Madison, Wisconsin doing what I do best, working and finding root beer in the evenings. Madison is kind of a disappointment in that regard, for while they have cheese aplenty, and many small craft breweries, the amount of root beer in said breweries is rather lacking. Which strikes me as odd since cities in Minnesota with half as many people will have multiple craft root beers on taps just waiting for me to try. But it took quite a bit of searching for me to find one. To be fair, a lot of places do have Sprecher and Baumeister on tap there, and fine brews they are, but still, they can do better. But anyways, Delta Beer Lab was started only in February of this year by a couple of brewery veterans who’d worked their way up. One of them even was head brewer at a place in Minneapolis. Perhaps that’s why he, unlike so many others in Madison, decided to do a root beer. The brewery itself is like a chemistry class/lab, which is fun, as you can get little beakers and flasks full of brew. They are also very socially progressive there, take that as you feel inclined, which includes refusing tips and just paying their employees a living wage with benefits. I loath paying tips (just tell me how much it really costs) so I can get behind that. But more importantly, can I get behind the root beer?
