As some of you may know, I’m moving soon. That’s right, I’m turning my back on this Evergreen home of mine and heading back East-ish to the land of 10,000 lakes. Also the land of pretty freaking sweet brewery root beers. So before I embark I needed to hit up the last few breweries in this area lest I be consumed by root beer regret for the rest of my days. And thus last Saturday, after much laziness and indecisiveness, I piled the family in the car and off we went on the 50 minute drive south to Puyallup to the Powerhouse Brewery. This has been the one I’ve wanted to try the most around here. It’s built in an old Puget Power brick substation and is decorated with insulators and other power systems equipment. This is essentially the perfect place for a power engineer/root beer reviewer (of which there are not many I’m sure). So how is this perfect for me brew?
The Body is sweet with a fruity tinge, accented by a some vanilla and a little dark licorice. It’s rather bland though. The Bite is pretty mild and lacking in both spice and carbonation. There isn’t much Head either. The Aftertaste is faint licorice but it isn’t strong.
Oh what a shame! It’s bland and fruity-ish and altogether not something I’d like to go and drink on a regular basis or ever for that matter. I get that a lot around here, unfortunately. I ordered some wings to go with the root beer and they were pretty good. The place is worth a visit for sure, but not for the root beer.
The Powerhouse Brewery.
Some of the inside decor.
More of the decor.
A cool display with old power engineering books.
A cool Jacob’s ladder that would turn on periodically.
This is the first root beer that I’ve had that warns not to give to children under 1 year of age. I mean, giving babies soda probably isn’t ever a good idea, but this uses pure honey, and so they put the warning on it. I imagine they’ve never boiled it or else the botulism spores would probably be dead right? Wouldn’t the carbonation also take care of the bacteria? Either way, better safe than sorry I suppose. Rollie’s comes from the 
I found it. I finally found it. After 18 years of searching the root beer world for Mug in glass bottles, someone kindly pointed me to a little known website that sold this in a blog comment. This whole blog is worth it just for that comment, because I can finally tell people what I think about one of the most common root beers out there. To put how badly I’ve wanted this into perspective. I had thought of calling a Pepsi bottler that does those little stubby glass bottles, and ordering a custom run of Mug in glass bottles. Would I need to buy a whole pallet for that? A whole truck load? I don’t know, but I was actually in the process of trying to do that. Yup. Now only one major brand left, Hires, we’ll see how long that takes me. What else to say about one of the most common brands of root beer out there? This is bottled by West Jefferson and is made with real sugar and not HFCS. So, what do I think of this long expected root beer?
