Minnesota has this thing called The Renaissance Festival, or Ren Fest for short. My family likes to attend because you can watch jousting while eating giant smoked turkey legs and do other fun activities and buy things at shops and dress up like a knight and whatnot. Last year, my sister found this being sold in one of the shops and bought me a bottle to review. I always appreciate people finding me new root beers. Faxon farms is a local producer of pure maple syrup that got started out of a hobby in 2010. They’ve expanded operations over the years to not just make pure maple syrup but also pure maple syrup products, including this root beer. I do love small farm maple syrup, being a hobbyist myself. I also love a good maple root beer.
The Body has a rich maple flavor with honey but quite mild on the rest of the root beer flavors. It starts strong but doesn’t maintain. The Bite is smooth, not really any spices. The Head is very short, gone quickly. Not quite the “2-Second Head”, but close. The Aftertaste is maple. Good maple. Quality maple, but that’s it.
This has a great maple, but not not so much a great root beer. I find that happens often, with maple or other flavored root beers. You make an amazing maple syrup, you want to make that into an amazing root beer, but you are not a root beer expert so you lean into your strength. You can’t just take a root beer and add maple, or even a good root beer and add maple, but you need to formulate what will be an amazing root beer because of its maple. That’s hard to do. As it stands, the delicious maple makes for a drinkable root beer, but not much else. See how it rates against other root beers.
