Dec 062023
 

I got this off of a trade with that great root beer reviewer anthony. Weis is a store chain founded in 1912 in Pennsylvania. They currently have expanded into Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and West Virginia, nowhere near where I live. I am, however, once again very pleased to see store brands carrying glass bottled gourmet root beer. The bottle looks the sort of generic that you’d expect from a store brand, brown root beer color with a barrel on it. I like it, obviously, because I like root beer. A curious thing about this is in the ingredients. They list “citric acid powder”, which is the first time I’ve ever seen that. I see citric acid a lot as an ingredient, but never in powdered form. Is it required to specify which form is used? I muse on this as there’s not much else to talk about with this one, other than the brew itself.

The Body is sweet and creamy with a lot of vanilla. It’s quite pleasant but there’s a hint of something a little out of place. The Bite is mild on spice, decently prickly, but not overly smooth in the finish. The Head is medium and fizzes down relatively quickly. The Aftertaste is sweet vanilla and ends with the faintest hint of that out of place flavor.

This is unexpectedly good for a store brand, I’ll say that. There’s nothing really unique but it does generic really well. It’s not quite good enough for a Seal, sadly, but better than most store brands out there, which is an accomplishment they can feel proud of. See how it rates against other root beers.

Three and a half kegs
Nov 012023
 

Back in August I found myself in Albuquerque for the final end of my project. If you’ve been following you’ll know that I’ve found several brews down there but I had hopes I could find another one. I searched for a couple of days, reaching out to every brewery and distillery I could find online, but no luck, so by Wednesday I’d given up on root beer and we decided to hit our favorite pizza join, Restoration Pizza. If you can’t get a new root beer, at least you can get an amazing pizza with green chile. When the waitress asked what we wanted to drink, we asked what kind of root beer they served. She informed us that they make their own. Well that blew me away. How’d I missed that? They’d just started making it a mere two months before. How serendipitous for me. Now I could have my pizza and my root beer too. The question is, how was it?

The Body is weak, not very sweet nor creamy and a little bitter wintergreen. The Bite is mild but not smooth. It could use more spice. The Head is short and foams away by the time they bring it out to you. The Aftertaste is milde and sort of bitter. There’s a little bit of caramel flavor to it though.

Yeah, this is not really a very good root beer at all. Hopefully they are still trying to improve their recipe because it does need some work. Their pizza is still amazing so I definitely recommend visiting, but maybe skip this, unless they make it better.

2 out of 5 root beer kegs
Restoration Pizza
Oct 042023
 

This one comes from a trade with that great collector and proprietor of The Museum of Root Beer, Vince. Pop Singles is an interesting brand that has a record on the label of their bottles, you know like it’s an old pop single. It makes googling the company rather difficult because there seems to be an actual single that was released about every flavor they carry (maybe that’s the idea?) and I couldn’t actually find a website. Maybe they don’t have one. I’m always very cautious about a clear root beer. A lot of real root beer ingredients are naturally a darker color, so if your root beer is crystal clear there’s some serious chemistry involved for flavor extraction and the sugar definitely wasn’t caramelized. In short, such brews seem highly unlikely to have a robust flavor profile. They do look cool and different though, so full points for novelty.

The Body is sweet with a mild, generic root beer flavor. It’s refreshing and a little acidic and there’s a slight hint of wintergreen and vanilla. The Bite is mild as well. There is a little spice and decent carbonation. The Head is medium and fizzes down quickly. The Aftertaste is mild and soda-ish.

This really isn’t particularly good. It’s almost like my experience with previous clear root beers and my reasons as to why they failed may actually be universally applicable. It may be impossible to make a colorless root beer be quality. We’ll never know until I find one. Till then, see how it rates against other root beers.

2 out of 5 root beer kegs