I ignored this brew for quite some time, thinking that I’d already tried it and that it was no good. My parents even bought me a few bottles and I was all secretly put out since why would they buy me bad root beer. Well they were buying me new root beer. What I’d had was Berghoff Famous Root Beer which if you followed the link will notice has a different label and slightly different name. It also has different ingredients and nutritional info, which I only found out when I dug out that bottle to write the long overdue post on it. I’m sorry Mom and Dad, you knew what you were doing all along. Clearly the people at Berghoff realized they had a poor brew on their hands and set about to remedy it. Despite having reviewed 260+ root beers at this point, this still has some new ingredients including ethyl alcohol and triethyl citrate. They must not put much alcohol in it because it sells as a soda and doesn’t list an alcohol percentage on the side. I’m going with it’s perfectly legit for all ages, creeds, religions, etc.
The Body is sweet and caramely with a good sassafras flavor and some vanilla undertones. But, something seems a little out of place, some faint thing under the surface. The Bite is pretty good with some cinnamon that doesn’t overpower. The Head is adequate, medium height and frothiness. The Aftertaste is vanilla and some cinnamon and that little something-not-quite-right. That doesn’t ruin it, but it does take it down a notch.
I’m thinking that maybe the whole out of place flavor was the ethyl alcohol. But who knows, it could have been any of the “natural flavorings” or that triethyl citrate. It is better than the previous Berhoff Famous Root Beer, so there’s that. See how it rates against other root beers.
I’m not sure if this is really that famous. It clearly says famous on the label, but other than the online site I bought this from, I’ve never seen nor heard about it. A&W I’d call a famous root beer, but Berghoff? I suppose it really boils down to what you define as famous and maybe they are in the region they’re from. There’s a very small “Chicago’s” written vertically in front of the famous which makes me wonder if it should be called Berghoff Chicago’s Famous Root Beer. The famous and the root beer are the same font so they clearly go together. This brew is also Old Fashioned and Draft Style, which are two cliches that really have no meaning in the root beer world as pretty much everyone uses them and there is no consistency between the root beers that do. I got this back in the late 1990’s in one of the first variety packs I ordered. No particular reason, I just needed to try it. It’s from a microbrewery Chicago who, like many others, developed it during prohibition. 
