Eric’s Gourmet Root Beer Blog – Page 3 – The blog of the gourmet root beer site.

Pop Singles Crystals Clear Root Beer

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.

Snow Eagle Brewing & Grill Homemade Root Beer

Draft and Keg Root Beers No Responses »

Sep 062023

In June I took a lovely long road trip with the family to Idaho. On the way back we went through Idaho falls and I had discovered this place the day before while scoping out if there was anything worth seeing near the supercharger. Snow Eagle Brewing is about a 15 minute walk along the Snake River park from the charger, right across from the scenic Idaho Falls themselves. Their website is very scant on details on their history, but they brew beer and have food and most importantly, brew their own root beer. Their glasses feature a samurai, which is a bit odd for Idaho, but Idaho Falls has a sister city in Japan, Tokai-Mura, so I guess they’re just taking that friendship to a new level.

It has a dark, old fashioned Body with a lot of licorice, some vanilla, and a little wintergreen. There’s too much licorice and it isn’t very sweet. The Bite is mild with a distict lack of spices for a dark, old fashioned brew. The Head is not there, not there at all. No foam that I could see. Very sad. The Aftertaste is licorice with hints of vanilla and a bitter wintergreen finish.

Sadly, this isn’t a particularly great root beer, it has too much licorice and just falls flat (both figuratively and literally) in every other category. It was a beautiful walk to see it, but I think I’d rather not walk near as far and check out some of the sites along the way next time. I have no idea how their food tastes because I didn’t get any, but it probably is decent. So if you find yourself craving a root beer while admiring the Idaho Falls, this will probably leave you disappointed, but it is at least, there.

The Snow Eagle taps. Root Beer on top, as it should be.

Summit Root Beer

Bottled Root Beers No Responses »

Aug 022023

I always appreciate it when brands make new root beers for me to drink. Take Aldi, that wonderful store with strange off brands and low prices. They also make their own gourmet root soda line, Summit. Why? Not sure, as that doesn’t seem to be the standard thing a cheap store does, but they do it. Now I’ve given middling reviews to their root beer before, and maybe that’s the reason they just keep changing their recipe, in an eternal struggle to gain my approval. Now being the considerate store they are, they also change the label and the name slightly, so it’s very easy for me to categorize it as a completely new root beer. Whereas previous iterations have been Summit <insert adjective> Root Beer, this one is just plain ol’ Summit. My wife spotted it for me awhile back while she was shopping at Aldi and guessed that I’d not had it yet. Always nice when new root beers just present themselves. So how did Aldi do this time?

The Body is sweet, though not overly so, with a nice vanilla. It has a generic creamy taste to it with a little hint of fruity but also a little lacking in depth. The Bite is sharp, harsh even, from carbonation but lacking in spice. The Head is okay. It’s medium all around. Nothing special yet adequate. The Aftertaste is light vanilla with the slightest fruity hints.

It’s an okay root beer, solid drinkable. Not quite as good as their Craft version, which I’m sure comes as a great disappointment to them. Last time they were three and a half and I imagine they hoped to push in that final half a keg, but sadly I think this version losses half a keg. Oh well, better luck next time. I suppose if they want to hire a root beer consultant, I can teach them the ways. See how it rates against other root beers.

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