As you know, I wholeheartedly endorse any and all efforts to increase the world’s supply and diversity of gourmet root beer. But this is on a whole new level. The Rock Island Brew Co.’s mission: to put handcrafted sodas made with real and fresh ingredients in the hands of their local community. They focus on making complex flavors with minimal ingredients. Creating old fashioned favorites like Root Beer, reminiscent of childhood, while also developing new and unique sodas such as Apple Cream. They sweeten with honey and use real vanilla and real sugar. The real kicker is, the seasonal pumpkin spice root beer. That’s right, these brewers are taking the gourmet root beer scene to seasonal varieties and theme brews, which has been largely lacking.
Their Kickstarter campaign is to get an automated bottling line up and running, so they can meet the demand for their sodas. They offer a wonderful reward of a four pack of any of their four flavors for only a $20 pledge. As someone who mail orders a lot of root beer in small quantities, this is an extremely good deal, or for $25, you can suggest your own prize, like a variety pack of soda. That’s what I did, two bottles of regular root beer and two of pumpkin spice root beer. $25 for two new types of mail order root beer is about as good as it gets. So please, for the love of root beer, click the link below and go make a pledge and help these fledgling brewers make the world a better place.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rockislandbrewco/craft-brewed-soda-by-rock-island-brew-co
Crater Lake holds a special place in my heart. My family, on the way back from Sacramento, took a detour to visit Crater Lake when I was 17. It was the summer before my senior year. It was beautiful and awe inspiring. I even took some pictures that I used as senior pictures. I’ve longed to return and camp and hike and fish and whatnot. When I first saw this root beer at a local QFC, I was immediately flooded by the good memories. The picture on the label, while nice, doesn’t capture the true majesty of the place. With pure cane sugar to boot, I hoped that this root beer would capture the majesty of the lake and caldera in a brew beyond description. Sadly it was not to be. 
Sometime in the past three years since I originally reviewed Oogave, they broke up with Esteban. I’m not sure what happened, but it must not have been pretty. Not only is Oogave’s root beer no longer named after him, but Esteban’s Seal of Approval is also gone. It may have had something to do with reformulating the recipe, for somehow, though the ingredients listed on the bottle are still the same, they managed to drop 2 calories from their brew so they could list it as a 100 calorie beverage. To be fair, the “natural flavors” from Esteban’s Root Beer could have been completely different from the “natural flavors” in the Agave Root Beer. Or maybe they just dropped half a gram of agave nectar to reduce it from 25.4 g to 24.9 g, as both would read the 25 g which is listed on the labels. Perhaps there was a great argument over the matter with Esteban storming out over the final decision, vowing they’d never get his approval again. Gone with Esteban is a sensible label. While it’s cool to have the bottle painted, what little yellow and white paint there is, when on a clear bottle, hardly shows up at all in the picture. Grrr!