Bottled Root Beers – Page 75 – Eric’s Gourmet Root Beer Blog

Cool Mountain Root Beer

Feb 072015

Cool Mountain Root Beer Bottle I ordered this online a long, long time ago, in a state far far away … At least I think I did. I’m pretty sure I was living in Utah at the time. When I got it was was very impressed with the Indian chief fellow on it. I’m not sure why they choose to put that picture on the bottle, but I just went with it. Fast forward to the present when I was going through my extensive bottle collection and writing blog reviews of all of those old school brews. And, um, well, I lost the bottle. I don’t know where it is. I went through box after box and found every other root beer bottle I’d ever reviewed. I don’t know what happened. I can’t believe that I would have just lost this one, but evidently I did. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Consolation prize, they still make Cool Mountain Root Beer, and they sell it at The Root Beer Store, so I went out and bought a bottle. According to the owner this has the same recipe as Chicago Draft Style Root Beer, but they are bottled at different locations which leads to a different flavor. This time they actually have a picture of a rather cool looking mountain so everything makes more sense. The shiny purple background is also a nice touch, but I still think the chief was cooler … cooler mountain.

This has a strong, sticky Body. There’s kind of a “dark” flavor to it. It has a very solid Bite. The Head is acceptable, but it bubbles away quickly. The Aftertaste is anise-ish which is rather icky to me.

When I drank it, there was an explosion of flavor in my mouth. The problem, it just doesn’t stop exploding. It’s alright I suppose, good enough if you really just need a root beer and there’s nothing else around. See how it rates against other root beers.

The Groovy Taste Root Beer

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Feb 042015

The Groovy Taste Root Beer Bottle A gourmet root beer from Indonesia. It’s always good to have connections, and I have many. This one came from a student of mine (did you know that I’m an affiliate professor?). He was going home over the Christmas break, to Indonesia. I told him to get me some of this, which he promised to bring. And sure enough, he did. Joshua, you are the greatest student ever. This is made by KMI (Kreasi Mas Indah) Beverages. They started in 2008 and are located on the West Java, they have two carbonated soda brands, this root beer and some soda water, also “In addition to beverage product, [they] have personal care division with products Tabashi Bar Soap”. Because why not? Their bottle is small, only 250 ml compared to the standard 355 in this country. The label is simple and classic for a root beer.

The Body is sweet and creamy with a medium strength generic root beer flavor. The Bite is very mild with little spice but adequate carbonation. It’s smooth so I can’t complain much, just for lack of spice. The Head is extremely tall and frothy. It couldn’t really be any better. The Aftertaste is a pleasant vanilla and cane sugar flavor.

Very nice. Very nice indeed. This non-North American root beer tastes like a proper creamy root beer. I’ve never had that before. No strange fruity, weird herbal, or extra sour. Just creamy, sweet root beer goodness. It’s still rather generic, though, if I were in foreign lands and really craving a root beer, this would be good enough, unlike anything else I’ve ever tried from abroad. It also has that extra good Head giving bonus points. See how it rates against other root beers.

Hank’s Premium Root Beer

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Jan 282015

More than any other root beer, Hank’s is the reason that Eric’s Gourmet Root Beer Site exists. You see, the web was young and free hosting was just recently made available at places like Geocities. It was the cool thing to do to make a website. After seriously considering making a website about a combination of three of my favorite things, cheese, Jethro Tull, and Star Craft, (The Eric’s Cheese, Jethro Tull, and Star Craft Site was going to be AWESOME I swear) the idea came to make one about gourmet root beer instead. Since I’d only tried eight different kinds of gourmet root beer (there wasn’t a lot of variety in a town of 5,000 people) at that point I figured I needed to expand a bit. I found Hank’s online and asked my Mom to order it for me. I had a whole $15. She called and they said that they’d never sent anything to Washington State before and they figured it’d be very expensive. She said she’d have to call back because she was buying it for her son who was making a website but he didn’t have much money. Then they decided that since it was for a website, and thus free publicity, they’d send a whole case as a free sample. How very generous. Also, it put a lot of expectation on me to actually follow through and make the website since I was paid in advance as it were. And thus Eric’s Gourmet Root Beer Site was born.

This is sooo goooood! It has a wonderfully full Body that is rich and creamy and a nice spicy Bite. The Head is almost perfect. Aftertaste is very pleasant.

As you can tell, I really liked it then (I’ve kept what I originally wrote back in 1998). It put me in quite an enigma because at the time it was the best brew I’d ever had, but I hadn’t had very many. I put it at 4.5 kegs and after many years I revisited it in my Ultimate Root Beer Showdown and realized that after nearly 150 root beers, it was still the best. But many years later, I realized that was because they had slightly changed their recipe and their name. So I’m keeping this version where it was and elevating their more recent iteration, acknowledging their slight tweak was just enough. See how it rates against other root beers.

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