I made a mistake 13 years ago. Back when I held my Ultimate Root Beer Showdown I said that Hank’s seemed better than I remembered. At that time I knew the bottle had changed, but I didn’t actually realized that they’d made a subtle change to both their recipe (substituting cane sugar for high fructose corn syrup) and their name (substituting Gourmet for Premium). What I thought was the Hank’s I’d reviewed in 1998 was actually a technically new root beer. I’d like to think that after seeing such a high ranking at gourmetrootbeer.com they strove to make their premium root beer even better, worthy of truly being, “Gourmet”, and renamed the brew once they’d achieved it. Regardless, change their recipe and name they did, and thus a new root beer I need to review. Since I’ve been drinking Hank’s continuously since then, the review itself comes as no surprise but I shall write it as if it did.
Sweet mother of root beer! This has an amazing Body. How root beer should taste. It’s sweet and rooty and creamy and spicy. It’s perfectly proportioned with nothing lacking. The Bite is solid but not overbearing. The Head is tall and foamy as a root beer should be. The Aftertaste is luscious vanilla that lasts the perfect amount of time.
I really, truly, love this stuff. It is perhaps as close to perfection as we can come in this imperfect world. See how it rates against other root beers.
I got this in late 1999 or early 2000. It was one of my first mail orders, and I had to order 12 of them since variety packs were not an option in those days. I picked it because it looks awesome with that train and metallic shine (which is really hard to capture in a picture with the flash on a white background). When I first tried it I was blown away like never before, I was standing when I took my first drink and I had to sit down. It was that good. I got on the phone and called a friend and told him I’d found the best root beer EVER, and I awarded my first 5 kegs. In the next year or so I had multiple cases and then I went on my mission to Madagascar, a great dry spell for me as it were. When I got back my parents had a case waiting, but as I drank it against Hank’s and Henry’s, it didn’t seem to taste as good as it once did. I figured I’d had a bad batch and over the years had it again and again, each time disappointed (and by that I mean not the greatest thing ever made). Finally I had the 
