Eric's Gourmet Root Beer Blog – The blog of the gourmet root beer site.

Pizza Port House Root Beer

Aug 052026

Back in May I was in San Diego, working, DERMSing, and also, visiting my Aunt Mom. I call her my Aunt Mom because she’s my Mom’s identical twin and she does look and sound uncannily like my mom. It is a strange experience growing up having a parent with a twin. Anyways, enough of that. Pizza Port. We met up and decided to go there because I’d known about Pizza Port for awhile now but had never the time to get there. Sometimes I’m far too busy to take an excursion. This time I wasn’t. Pizza Port is a small pizza and brewery chain around the San Diego area. The owners have been running it since 1987 with focus on great pizza and house brewed beers, for which they’ve won quite a few rewards. They also brew a house root beer, which my Aunt and cousins and I went to try along with some pizza.

The Body is sweet but not too sweet with a solid sassafras core that just, is. There aren’t a lot of other flavors in there. There’s Bite though, it’s spicy, but other than sassafras and those Bite spices, it’s just, plain. The Head is very short but it does maintain a slight ring of foam around the rim. The Aftertaste is light and then gone quickly.

This root beer is all core and no accents. It’s perfectly generic yet not at all unpleasant. It complements their pizza extraordinarily well and though I didn’t get one of their root beer floats, I imagine that a scoop of quality vanilla ice cream would make a heavenly float. So while it isn’t the best root beer by any means, it’s quite a well designed root beer for a meal/float option. The specialty pizza options are pretty impressive and the Meet Extreme Meat pizza we got was just amazing.

Root Beer Float Cinnamon Toast Crunch

Root Beer Snacks No Responses »

Jul 062026

A little while ago I was shopping at Walmart and saw this in a center display. I had heard about these before on Swagbucks survey I’d taken about a month earlier about branding. This is part of a America 250th birthday flavor series where they have some commemorative “American” flavors to celebrate the big 250. I of course, had to try it. Not only because it’s root beer float flavor, but because I generally love Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Without milk, you can taste a sort of root beer extract flavor that doesn’t really mix well with everything else, but when you add the milk (making the whole float part), it really does have a subtle root beer float flavor mixed in there. I quite enjoy a cinnamony root beer float. So this was actually a treat and I had a bowl every day until it was gone. My kids like it too. It’s definitely worth grabbing a box this July if you haven’t already.

Faxon Farms Maple Root Beer

Bottled Root Beers No Responses »

Jul 012026

Minnesota has this thing called The Renaissance Festival, or Ren Fest for short. My family likes to attend because you can watch jousting while eating giant smoked turkey legs and do other fun activities and buy things at shops and dress up like a knight and whatnot. Last year, my sister found this being sold in one of the shops and bought me a bottle to review. I always appreciate people finding me new root beers. Faxon farms is a local producer of pure maple syrup that got started out of a hobby in 2010. They’ve expanded operations over the years to not just make pure maple syrup but also pure maple syrup products, including this root beer. I do love small farm maple syrup, being a hobbyist myself. I also love a good maple root beer.

The Body has a rich maple flavor with honey but quite mild on the rest of the root beer flavors. It starts strong but doesn’t maintain. The Bite is smooth, not really any spices. The Head is very short, gone quickly. Not quite the “2-Second Head”, but close. The Aftertaste is maple. Good maple. Quality maple, but that’s it.

This has a great maple, but not not so much a great root beer. I find that happens often, with maple or other flavored root beers. You make an amazing maple syrup, you want to make that into an amazing root beer, but you are not a root beer expert so you lean into your strength. You can’t just take a root beer and add maple, or even a good root beer and add maple, but you need to formulate what will be an amazing root beer because of its maple. That’s hard to do. As it stands, the delicious maple makes for a drinkable root beer, but not much else. See how it rates against other root beers.

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