Another one from anthony as part of our on going root beer trades. The picture on the label is hilarious/ridiculous. The root beer keg, while firing off his six shooters, is actively trying to drink the drops of root beer coming out of the tap. But since the tap is where his nose would be, it’s akin to being excited to drink out of one’s own runny nose. But then the fact that he’s a root beer keg means, that what he drinks will go back into the keg, so maybe he just doesn’t want to waste any root beer. And then he’s shooting as well and … maybe I’m just over thinking it. Fun back story. About three weeks before I tried this I had bought some blue agave nectar from Trader Joe’s to see how it went with waffles. I liked it a lot and mused that it would taste really good in root beer while lamenting that the other non-blue agave flavored root beers I’ve had have not been stellar.
The Body is full and rich with creamy vanilla and blue agave nectar featuring prominently. It has a rather heavy feel to it which I think is from said nectar. Everything mingles together to give a wonderful flavor that’s familiar and comforting as well as unique. The Bite is very mild. There’s a little spice but the carbonation is really lacking. The Head is poor, there’s no point mincing words over that. It’s very short, yet frothy so as to be better than the two-second-Head. It’s just that it isn’t carbonated enough to build a Head. The Aftertaste is a delicious combination of the blue agave and vanilla that lasts the perfect amount of time.
Wow, yummy. I was right about blue agave in root beer. The only flaw in this is that it really doesn’t have much carbonation, which was their stated goal on the bottle. They wanted to make it so that it would go better in floats so no over foaming. I can respect that, but without a better Head, it can’t get the Seal, what a shame. Give this sucker a Henry’s style Head and some more Bite and we’re talking top 10 root beers ever, maybe even top 5. Oh well, it would make some amazing floats at least. See how it rates against other root beers.
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!
