Eric’s Gourmet Root Beer Blog – Page 34 – The blog of the gourmet root beer site.

Red Wing Brewery Good Old Zimmie’s Root Beer

Jan 082020

A pint of Red Wing Brewery Root Beer On New Year’s Day the weather was beautiful and it hadn’t snowed for a few days so I thought I’d take a scenic drive with the family. I figured something the drove along the Mississippi River would be nice, and I knew that in the city of Red Wing, there was a brewery that also made their own root beer. So after a nice drive on the Wisconsin side of the river, we found ourselves at the little Red Wing Brewery. The city of Red Wing actually has a storied past with breweries, but they all were closed by the 1950s. The Red Wing Brewery is the first to open there since 1951. Now the root beer is called Good Old Zimmie’s and this time I actually had the presence of mind to ask why it was called this. I was told that they looked through the long history of Red Wing beers and chose from those names. Good Old Zimmie’s was the name of some old brew. Go figure.

The Body is dark and spicy, yet isn’t full flavored. Wintergreen and clove stand out, but there’s a sort of emptiness after that. The Bite is spicy! Lot’s of clove and other spices. I wish it were a little smoother though. The Head is OK, medium height and foam. The Aftertaste is bitter wintergreen and a clove. It’s too bitter for me.

It’s not bad, it just quite enough. The balance is all off, and though it isn’t really unpleasant, it’s not something that I’d really want to drink again, even with the yummy pizzas they serve there. Tragic, I know. Alas. It’s a scenic little town, but skip this root beer.

2.5/5 Root Beer Kegs

The Red Wing Brewery Brew Vats

The Red Wing Brewery Taps. The root beer is the first in the series.

Barq’s Crafted Soda Root Beer

Bottled Root Beers No Responses »

Jan 012020

Barq's Crafted Soda Root Beer Bottle Canadian Barq’s! That’s right, they make it different in Canada. I don’t know why, but they do. Not only do they only use pure cane sugar, but they use a little less sugar in total, and there’s less sodium. The nutritional information is therefore different, as the ingredients, slightly. And they even had the decency to call it something different, Crafted Soda. That’s not what we call it down here. So that means I can review it properly as it’s own brew. It even has a different logo. I found this in Toronto last year in a grocery store near my hotel. It caused quite a stir in the online root beer community, as no one knew about its existence. Maybe it’s something that came out recently? But the real questions, is it good, and does it taste the same as American Barq’s?

The Body has a rich creamy sassafras flavor with some nice vanilla surfacing after the initial contact and caramel notes. It’s a rather middle of the road, almost generic creamy root beer. The Bite is a little prickly from carbonation, but otherwise lacking in spices. It finishes moderately smooth. The Head is very tall but fizzes down a little too fast. The Aftertaste is vanilla with hints of caramel and the slightest bit of the sarsaparilla flavor you get in American Barq’s.

This is markedly different. I even went out and got a bottle of American Barq’s just to make sure. There’s more than just sugar substitution going on for this type of flavor difference. This is clearly, not your father’s Barq’s, but it’s better in my opinion, and earns an extra half a keg. Definitely worth trying if you can find it, just to see how different the same brand can be across a boarder. See how it rates against other root beers.

Pucker Powder Sweet Root Beer

Root Beer Candy No Responses »

Dec 252019

Pucker Powder Sweet Root Beer

Last time I was at Blue Sun Soda I noticed this in their candy section. They had little plastic tubes of various sizes where you could fill from the various flavors, including this “Sweet Root Beer”. Pucker powder itself is the creation of Creative Concepts, Inc. Their start was actually dispensers for colored sand in order to make tube art. They expanded the idea to make “interactive candy art”. The idea is the station will have multiple flavors, each of a different color, which you can dispense into your tube to make colorful designs. Then you can eat it because that’s way more fun than mere sand. I think it’s a very cool concept, yet I was only interested in their root beer, so I only got the smallest tube possible and filled it with nothing but that.

It has a chalky texture and is sweet, though not as sweet as I’d expected. It’s a little tart and the root beer flavor is mild and generic and you can’t really make out any specific flavors. It reminds me of my memory of the root beer Bottle Caps I would eat as a child.

This isn’t very good to be honest. I don’t really like the flavor, nor the texture. Maybe some of the other flavors are better, but I didn’t try them. It reminds me of pixie sticks, though a less sweet version of them, which I think actually makes it a bit worse. If you’re the sort of person who loves to consume flavored sugar powder in large quantities though, you may love these. Or if you love to make edible art, you’ll probably not care as much about the flavor and when you need that sort of tan color, you’ll get some of this. I’m not really in either camp so I’ll pass on the whole thing in the future.

Older Entries Newer Entries