Tesla Motors Club – Page 2 – Eric’s Gourmet Root Beer Blog

Great Basin Brewing Company Root Beer

Aug 172016

A pint of Great Basin Brewing Company Root Beer Tesla Gigafactory Road Trip Brew number two. This one was in Reno. On the first night after the TMC Connect welcome reception. I had checked to see if there were any local breweries and found that the Great Basin Brewing Company was only a 15 minute walk from the conference center. So I asked some of my friends if they wanted to walk down with me and got a merry crew of three other Tesla enthusiasts. Along the way we caught Pokémon because they play as well as me and I can’t miss an opportunity to catch more. Plus Nevada is all desert and so lots of rock and fire type spawn there whereas in the rainy, river filled Seattle area I mostly catch water type. The brewery itself was a gym so my friends and I, who are on different teams, battled unceasingly over it until the root beer arrived. And since you care more about root beer than my Pokémon adventures, I’ll get on that part of the post.

The Body features a strong wintergreen flavor with cloves and a decent amount sassafras, yet it feels that there’s something missing. There’s a sharp Bite with the spices present. The Head is excellent, though it fizzes away just a little faster than I’d like. The Aftertaste is wintergreen that ends a little bitter.

This is okay. I’ve had better but had much worse. It reminds me of that Designation Root Beer but with a much, much better Head. So I’d drink it again. I have no idea how the food is at this place, since I’d just come from a fully catered reception, I wasn’t hungry at all, but I’m sure it is good.

Three kegs

Portland Soda Works Root Beer

Draft and Keg Root Beers No Responses »

Aug 102016

A glass of Portland Soda Works Root Beer Two weeks ago I embarked on an awesome road trip to TMC Connect and the Tesla Gigafactory Grand Opening party. My friend from Vancouver and I carpooled as usual but now he has a Model S P90D instead of that Model S 60 he used to. Since it was a road trip I quickly looked over the route to find any root beers that would need to be tested. The first was one I’d known about for awhile, the Portland Soda Works. They have a very awesome story about their creation. The condensed version is they started their company to provide high quality alternatives for those who enjoy eating at restaurants but don’t drink alcohol, something I can totally get behind. I can’t stand how we straight-edge folks get left out. They also wanted to make their sodas from whole ingredients, if they can’t get the the roots or leaves themselves, it isn’t going into their drinks. Such dedication is a rare find. Unfortunately that also means that they can’t use sassafras because of the FDA and their questionable research, so it’s a sarsaparilla base. They had actually known about me for awhile, so when I asked if I could drop by for a taste they were very accommodating. They showed me and my friend their entire operation in the old bakery in the sketchy neighborhood by the railroad tracks. They let us taste a lot of different syrups and flavors, but then it was on to business, their root beer.

The Body is very rich with sarsaparilla the dominant flavor and a complex blend of other spices and flavors including cloves, star anise, and vanilla. It’s very sweet as well. The Bite is solid and spicy but it finishes oh so smooth. The Head is tall and foamy. It lingers and tastes wonderful and silky smooth. The Aftertaste is a rich vanilla with a bit of sarsaparilla flavor.

Wow! It’s not your archetypal root beer flavor to be sure, but they still captured enough of that root beeriness to to have it fall on the side of the root beer line. I’ve had some mixed experience with those all natural sarsaparilla based brews before, but none of them have pulled it off like these guys. I am proud to give this my Seal of Approval!

4 kegs

Their syrups and some flavor experimentation.

The building that houses the Portland Soda Works and other businesses.

Root Beer Hunting in a Tesla on the Electric Superhighway

Random Root Beer-ness 2 Responses »

Aug 042014

Two weeks ago I went to TMC Connect, the Tesla Motors Club conference and expo. If you’ve followed this blog, you’ll know that a lot of the draft root beers have been found while I was at conferences related to electric cars, being the expert that I am. So anyways, I was a panelist at TMC Connect and I had to find a way to Monterey, CA. I posted on the forum that if anyone wanted to carpool down, I would buy all of the electricity needed to get there. This was a joke, since Teslas can charge for free at the Superchargers. Either way, a fine fellow by the name of Paul driving from Vancouver, BC agreed to take me down.

The road trip experience in a Tesla is far different than what I was experienced with while growing up. In my youth we’d push and push, stopping only for gas and ten minute bathroom breaks. We’d cover a lot of miles but never really know much about what was in between Point A and Point B. Interestingly, for much of those trips Point A was in Washington and Point B was Sacramento. On this particular trip Sacramento was also our first stop over and I was thus fully able to appreciate the differences between the traditional road trip experience and the Tesla road trip of the future. Instead of pushing though, you need to stop every 150 miles or so to get a 30 minute charge. It was then that I realized that a Tesla with supercharging is the perfect for root beer hunting. Many of the superchargers were in places where craft root beers could be found.

Hop Valley Brewing Company near the Tesla Supercharger in Springfield Oregon

Not far from the Centralia charger is Dick’s Brewery. Further south in Springfield the Hop Valley Brewery right next to the supercharger had their own root beer. There are several other breweries in Springfield and though I didn’t look to see if they had their own since I had already found one. In Grant’s Pass I was told that Wild River had their own root beer, and at the next stop in Mount Shasta I found Etna Brewing Company Root Beer at the supermarket near the supercharger. And these are just a few that are in the towns connected by superchargers on I-5. I’m sure that there were more places I could have found along the way, but root beer hunting was not the main objective of the trip, and I’d already had good success. None of these places we’d ever even stop in when I was a kid driving to Sacramento, and many cool experiences were likely lost. While it does take longer to road trip in an EV, I think the experience is far superior, as it forces you to enjoy everything in between.

Additionally, the idea of extremely cheap to free travel suddenly makes root beer questing guilt free and enjoyable. There are numerous breweries and root beer stands only a few hours from me but the cost doesn’t seem to justify a solo trip. With an EV, especially a Tesla, that isn’t a concern. It is my opinion that the future of automobiles is EVs, and as far as root beer questing is concerned, it’s going to be a great future indeed.

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