In high school I had several friends that were obsessed with the Mad Max trilogy. They even bought cars that looked somewhat like The Last V8 Interceptor and tried to make them more so. It was an infectious craze and soon we all would make ridiculous Road Warrior references at all occasions. It should come as no surprise then, that the in first variety pack of root beer I ever ordered, I had to include Mad River, because that is clearly what Mad Max would drink. It even says “Drink Mad” on the bottle. Upon receipt of my brew, I was of course the envy of our little group of Mad Max maniacs. But there’s so much more depth to this bottle than a Mel Gibson reference. They plastered all sorts of taglines and catch phrases on this in the hopes that one of them would stick. From clichés like “The original” to “Live it up, this is not a rehearsal” They even tell about their cold brewed process and how their all natural, a fact that escaped me back then because I didn’t even care. Evidently they even use some “traditional methods of a 125 year old brewery” whatever that’s supposed to mean. Interestingly the river in question is a rather small part of the label. You’d think they’d put more emphasis on that.
This has a fabulous Bite, but the Head is terrible, the Body is weak and the Aftertaste is strange.
And thus it was that this root beer, despite all of its catchphrases, missed the most important one, something to do with Bite. That’s all I could remember of it. It was completely unremarkable other than when it hit your mouth it bit just perfectly before turning all weak and strange. Unsurprisingly, this is long since out of business. I guess the market for Mad Max obsessed teenagers buying the soda for a novelty could only take them so far. See how it rates against other root beers.
