Not the Roman Empire nor the Galactic Empire, or even the lesser known Ajuuraan Empire, this is the Empire Bottling Works which seems to have no ties to any empires at all. Rather they are from the smallest state in the Union which would be a more pathetic empire than the Ajuuraan (should Rhode Island empirify). This leaves me completely lost as to the reason for the name. It’s not even like they’re from New York with the whole Empire State nickname and whatnot (why you would want to call a state governed by representative democracy the Empire State is an entirely different matter all together) so really I’ve got nothing. They don’t even have a website (their empire is too small evidently) so it’s not like you can just look it up. They do provide a phone number on the bottle so I suppose if I really cared (or cared during business hours in the eastern time zone), I could just call them. Besides the phone number, the bottle has a little crown which is the only empire related thing other than the name.
The Body is dark and rooty, but it is also lacking in some essential flavors. The Bite is nothing special but it’s there. The head is a decent height but it doesn’t last long at all. The Aftertaste is a sticky licorice and wintergreen flavor that lingers annoyingly long, especially since it isn’t a good flavor to have lingering.
So, will this imperialistic root beer conquer the world or at least the root beer market or at very least my taste buds and sense for a quality brew? In a word, “No.” All in all, I really don’t like this root beer that much. If licorice and wintergreen is your thing, you may like to give this one a try, I’ll pass. See how it rates against other root beers.
I love my coworkers. They’re always willing to bring me back root beers from their trips. This one was brought back from Texas by my esteemed colleague Jimmy Jeff, who has family there and goes often. H-E-B is a grocery store chain in Texas and northern Mexico. The fact that they not only have their own root beer in glass bottles, but have one of the coolest and completely original bottles puts them in a class above almost any other grocery chain in existence in my opinion. An added bonus, if you like being bilingual, is that the label is also in Spanish, which sets this also in a class of its own since all other root beers I’ve encountered with bi-lingual labeling did so in French and English (to keep the Québécois happy). So they’ve got about everything going for them up to this point. How is the brew itself?
The very first grad school class I ever took involved having assigned homework partners for the entire class and lots of Matlab coding. As the Matlab expert on my team, I was assigned the task of writing the scripts to solve the problems. But I wanted to make sure that any script I wrote would be able to solve any problem of that type and spent extra time writing them. I said that I was writing robust code, though I’m not sure that is the proper term. I went on so much on the robustness of my code that one of my teammates called our team The Robusters. This was of course the first thing that I thought of when I saw Robusto Root Beer. The next thing I thought of was Robinson Crusoe, who doesn’t actually have the same name but it is phonetically similar. So evidently the Caruso family loved to make sodas, and though they’ve departed this world, they left the legacy of root beer (Robusto nonetheless), which is the best thing to be remembered by.
