This has a really cool bottle. I’ve never seen another bottle like it. It’s really neat when a company has their own unique bottle. It’s a classy bottle as well. With the diamonds, the embossed name, and the short stubby look to it. The label is even painted on, so it makes me wonder if they still reuse their bottles. The company is Canadian in origin whose founders seem to be anti-hippies according to their website which is more to their credit. Their original gimmick was that they would have their own pop outlets to cut out the middle man and reduce prices. While it worked for awhile they were eventually bought and now, thankfully, you can get them through other distributors, which is how I cam across this on.
The Body is sweet on the initial contact and then is a little creamy with a hint of fruity. It is a little light on some of the essential root beer flavors and isn’t really creamy enough for a quality root beer. The Bite is very smooth, which isn’t a bad thing. The Head is how a Head should be. Frothy, foamy, and it lasts forever. Seriously, I do believe the pyramids will erode before the Head fully disappears. I have never seen a root beer Head last so long. Maybe it’s the propylene glycol they put in it (I’ve never had a root beer with that either.) The Aftertaste is sweet and slightly creamy and fruity.
So the fruity really ruins this one, as well as the light flavors. It does recoup a lot of points on from that eternal Head, but still not quite enough to win a Seal of Approval. It does win the Diamond Head Award, if I had such an award, but I don’t so it really only gets 3.5 kegs. See how it rates against other root beers.
I’ve long passed up reviewing Steelhead because I thought it was identical to 
I got this awhile back as part of my massive purchase in the Great Root Beer Binge (about 80 bottles, 40 varieties of root beer, a new review every other day, and a bottle of Henry’s before every review) when I was revamping the site, but never wrote a blog post on it. What jumped out at me about this was that it seems very classy and professional, especially the label. I mean, the cursive fonts the background picture of the brewery building that’s almost like a water mark, the way the brewery name is presented, it’s like a certificate almost. Adding to the coolness is that this comes from an actual brewery and not just a soda company. Lion Brewery also used to own the Olde Philadelphia soda line, but a little over two years ago it was sold to new owners who changed the recipes. Old Philadelphia is still bottled by the Lion Brewery though, and is listed on their website. It took several emails back and forth between the two groups to get it all straightened out, especially since the Lion Brewery calls the Old Philadelphia William Penn Root Beer instead of Old Fashioned Root Beer. Since the sale and reformulation, William Penn Root Beer has ceased to exist. Lion Brewery Root Beer on the other hand, is still its original recipe, made and bottled by the brewers themselves.