Yet another UK root beer. Well, kind of a UK root beer. Soda Folk is a UK company and this brew can only be obtained there, but the owner is from Colorado and the root beer is actually made by the Tommyknocker Brewery. I figured it out when I saw they used maple syrup and aged vanilla which Tommyknocker also uses. The labels used identical paper as well. The owner, Ken, said that it was even Tommyknocker’s recipe. Then I had to figure out which recipe it was since Tommyknocker seems to have a new recipe every other year, and whether or not it was unique. As best as I could track down it appeared to be Tommyknocker New Root Beer but with some slight differences in the nutritional info, most likely to meet UK standards. So it is different so I can review it. This was very welcome news to anthony who ordered this brew and graciously traded me some. Who’d want to spend shipping fees to England only to find it’s merely a vanity label? But since it isn’t on to the review.
The Body is medium strength with aged vanilla and maple flavors. Wintergreen is also present. The Bite is strong, sharp, and spicy. The Head is good and lingers. The Aftertaste is more maple and vanilla with a little bitter hint, from the wintergreen.
Well this is a pretty good brew. Especially when you think that it’s sold in England. I would say that it’s the best UK root beer yet, but since it’s made in Colorado, I can’t really label it that way. There is hope for our neighbors across the pond though, if they start liking this stuff, maybe it’ll raise the quality of the rest of their brews. See how it rates against other root beers.
This was the last root beer that I reviewed before heading to Utah to do my undergrad at BYU. Since I didn’t have a digital camera at the time, I just put up a stock photo of this that I found online (I apologize if I infringed on anyone’s copyright, I’ve taken down the offending image). It showed this having a silver foil wrapping around the cap of the bottle. The ones I had, however, didn’t come with any fancy silver foil on the caps. My bottle, as you can see, is very plain. As it hailed from Chicago, it has the Sears tower in the background. I have no idea what the building in the foreground is. Maybe some church, maybe their bottling plant, maybe some random building in Chicago that they just really like, or maybe, the location of the hidden scrolls that will give the directions to unlocking the secret to the best root beer in the world, of which this is only a tribute. This was made by the Clover Club Bottling plant as their own house root beer and has since been discontinued. I didn’t know it wouldn’t be around now when I bought it then. I was very lucky.
