A and W. Two letters that redefined the root beer and fast food landscape. While Charles Hires brought us the fine drink we call root beer, it was Allen and Wright that took it to the modern era. Forty-three years after Hires swept the nation with dry powdered concentrate and bottled goodness, a new player entered the fray with a new way to do things. While Hires was a genius in advertising, and Allen the father of the modern franchise. Within two decades his root beer stands dotted the land and his brew the most commonly drank root beer in the country and became the defacto root beer standard definition of a root beer for many. Other business titans, like the Marriotts, sprang from humble franchise owners. While growing up, for me, A&W was the good stuff. The special root beer instead of the store brands. And after I became The Root Beer Gourmet, A&W also ushered in another era. For while I’d had several types of glass bottled root beer, and had sworn never to go back to cans or plastic, it wasn’t until I found bottles of this being sold in a mini-mart on White Pass that I started my root beer bottle collection. I was traveling there with my future brother-in-law to get his sister on the other side of the pass. I’d never seen my old favorite in glass bottles and I wanted to keep the bottle to show my dad.
It’s got a good Body and nice Head, but is too harsh in the carbonation on the Bite. Aftertaste is very pleasant.
This is a nice creamy root beer that’s good but not quite top notch. It’s middle of the road though, so everyone pretty much likes it if they like root beer. After that trip I decided that I would collect a root beer bottle from every new brew that I drank, and rate them as to which was the best. The website idea came several weeks later. A&W, once again it’d changed the root beer world. See how it rates against other root beers.
One day, out of the blue, I get an email from the people at 
Bedford’s is another root beer that comes from close to my home. Their company is from Port Angeles, and though it seems that they originally bottled it there, it is currently listed Orca Beverages as one they bottle. Ironically, I didn’t find it anywhere in Washington, but down in Provo, UT. It was several years ago and you can see that whoever bottled it then, used aluminum screw caps which you almost never see anymore (and Orca doesn’t currently do). Jones also uses those bottles so maybe it’s a Puget Sound thing. As an aside, even the first A&W I had from glass bottles was like that but more on that another day. I like the medieval-ish banner and logo. Then there’s the fact that they used the same font for all of the text and the label’s a winner in my book. 