My lovely wife got me a four-pack of this for me for Christmas. Root beer Christmas presents are always the best Christmas presents, and Hanukkah presents, and birthday presents, and Valentine’s Day presents, and wedding anniversary presents, and … Easter presents? You get the idea. This one I could tell was different just by looking at it. It’s all natural and is kind of pale amber. I’ve said before that the only reason a root beer is colored brown is because some of the original, natural ingredients were brown, and if it isn’t brown it doesn’t have those ingredients. My other question is why #4? Was there a number 1-3? Regardless, I’ve now had a Batch 001, 002, and a No. 9 root beer, so #4 is really just a natural progression of things. I’m sure I’ll collect the missing six numbers to complete my base ten digits root beer collection.
The Body is light and creamy and with ginger and herbs the prominent flavors. It tastes like a spiced ginger tea with some vanilla. The Bite is good and robust. It’s nice and spicy with ginger and cinnamon and some other spices with some carbonation burn mixed in. The Head is super tall and very frothy. The Aftertaste is a light vanilla and spice flavor.
This is tastes really good, but not at all like root beer. More like an iced herb tea. You would never call it a root beer if it didn’t say so on the bottle. It’s always a conundrum about how to rate such root beers, with me generally falling into the if-it-doesn’t-taste-like-root-beer-it-doesn’t-rate-high-as-a-root-beer camp. This is no exception. It is a fine, delicious soda, but I’d never, EVER drink it if I needed a root beer fix. See how it rates against other root beers.
One day I decided to expand my Google Maps brewery searches of the region to a larger radius to see just what I could find. I went to the home page of Roslyn Brewing Company and saw that they have a root beer, No. 9 Root Beer to be exact. I was both elated and shocked. Roslyn is five minutes off of the freeway on the way to my parents’ house. I’ve driven past there dozens of times in the past few years and never knew there was gourmet root beer just waiting for me to try. And of course it would be another five months or so before I went to visit my parents again so I couldn’t try it right away. Roslyn itself is a tiny little town that used to be a coal mining town, a rarity in Washington State. It’s all old fashioned looking and their brewery’s taproom only has six stools. Since no minors (only miners?) are permitted, I had to leave the kids outside with a promise that I’d bring the root beer out to them after my review. Sadly this has nothing to do with the Beatles, but rather is named after coal mine No. 9 which supplied coal to the trains going over Snoqualmie Pass.
