Another growler review! It’s been so long I bet you thought I didn’t do those anymore. Well I do. I just haven’t had anyone get me brews from in a growler. Draft is more fun if you can get it. Sonoran has been on my radar for a long while, but then they stopped bottling for some reason. Some root beer friends of mine had promised to send me some with a trade but held off for a long time, hoping that it would return to its bottled glory. Over a year passed, and it never returned. So they filled this growler for me and sent it my way. I was worried, because they waited a week to send it. I’d never had a growler older than four days before. Would it would be flat and ruined? Would it taste stale? What’s the fresh life on a growler anyhow?
The Body is sweet and spicy and caramely with some vanilla. There’s something a little off about it though. It’s got a good Bite as well, nice and spicy and even some carbonation despite being from a growler. I don’t rate the Head from a growler, but my first glass still had a decent one. I’m impressed. The Aftertaste is more caramel and vanilla, with a hint of wintergreen. There’s a little something funny that pops up, it may just be that it’s old brew, but it disappears quickly.
Wow, yum, yummy and not ruined at all by being so old. Two weeks may not be that long after all. It even had the best Head of any growler brew I’ve ever had, even though I don’t give points for that. Silly me for worrying, they knew what they were doing all along. Finally a growler review that I can give a Seal of Approval. I can only imagine how this would be fresh out of the tap. Definitely get it if you can.
I’d known about this for a long time, but I never seem to head down to Portland ever. I tried calling them once, but they didn’t want to ship anything up to me. One day I was emailing with a nice chap named Aaron who wanted to know about good draft brews in between Seattle and Portland, as he journeys between the two frequently. I told him all of the one’s I know and then asked if he could pick me up some of this. He delivered it to The Root Beer Store in Puyallup and then I had to wait for the owner to bring it to their Redmond store so I could pick it up during lunch and then bike with it back to Bothell. Evidently the bottles traveled some 1,400 miles before they even ended up in Puyallup. I think it’s the most complicated trade I’ve ever hashed out. Now for the elephant in the room, the label, or rather, the lack thereof. I don’t know why they don’t label it. I asked them as much when I called. They were adamant that they wouldn’t, no matter how I pleaded with them. It must be a Portlandian thing or something like that. I can’t see how this benefits them at all, but people from that area are largely inscrutable. My usual requirement for a bottled root beer is that it has to have a label. I’ll make an exception this once and only once. The non-labeled root beer is Oregon City Soda Company. As for ingredients and nutritional info, who knows … Now that I think about it I’m not actually sure that’s legal.
This root beer has an interesting gimmick. Supposedly the recipe was discovered by a one Joe Marshall as he futilely looked for the Santa Fe Trail in 1848. According to his “journal” after three days of searching he met some people who gave him food and a brew made from roots and herbs called “root beer.” He liked it so much he gave up looking for the trail and settled there, evidently. Joe was great-great grandfather of Shelly Schierman, who is an owner of the Louisburg Cider Mill and Lost Trail Soda Co. which happens to be in Kansas, so they didn’t really move far from where Great GrandPappy got lost. Joe seemed to have written the recipe down in his journal, but no one really cared for the next 150 odd years when Shelly started making it. The label expectedly features a cowboy on a horse looking quite lost. 