This one is made by the Crown Valley Winery and named after a Siberian Tiger in the Crown Ridge Tiger Sanctuary. This was most likely done as an appeasement measure to keep the tigers on the ridge and out of the valley, you know, like sacrifices to the volcano gods. The bottle sports a picture of Izzy, who is a male tiger, lest there be some confusion over the gender of that name. Evidently if you collect the bottle caps you can send them in for prizes from the sanctuary who then gets some additional tribute money from the winery. It’s like cereal box tops for your school, except is root beer bottle caps for … tigers. Another plus is that this is all natural with no preservatives for those of you, like my wife, who hate artificial flavorings and sodium benzoate.
The Body has a rich vanilla and wintergreen flavors accompanying a medium strength sassafras core. There’s a solid Bite with this one as well from ample spices. The Head is medium-tall and very frothy and foamy. It lasts the whole time you drink it. The Aftertaste is a spiced vanilla and wintergreen. It has a nice clean mouth feel from the lack of preservatives as an added bonus.
This is a quality brew in all respects. Dare I say, the best all natural root beer that I’ve had. Now I wish I lived closer to that tiger sanctuary. I’d get all sorts of cool prizes with the amount of this stuff that I’d drink. See how it rates against other root beers.
Sometime in the past three years since I originally reviewed Oogave, they broke up with Esteban. I’m not sure what happened, but it must not have been pretty. Not only is Oogave’s root beer no longer named after him, but Esteban’s Seal of Approval is also gone. It may have had something to do with reformulating the recipe, for somehow, though the ingredients listed on the bottle are still the same, they managed to drop 2 calories from their brew so they could list it as a 100 calorie beverage. To be fair, the “natural flavors” from Esteban’s Root Beer could have been completely different from the “natural flavors” in the Agave Root Beer. Or maybe they just dropped half a gram of agave nectar to reduce it from 25.4 g to 24.9 g, as both would read the 25 g which is listed on the labels. Perhaps there was a great argument over the matter with Esteban storming out over the final decision, vowing they’d never get his approval again. Gone with Esteban is a sensible label. While it’s cool to have the bottle painted, what little yellow and white paint there is, when on a clear bottle, hardly shows up at all in the picture. Grrr!
