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Hello and welcome to the oldest, largest and frankly the best root beer reviewing site in the world! over 625 brands reviewed so far! i also throw in birch beer and sarsaparilla reviews occasionally while i am at it since to me, they are the same genre. once in a while i even detour into other branches of the root beer tree, such as spruce beer, dandelion & burdock and the like. a new review publishes every week on Monday with the random post or review of root beer related stuff every once in a while. feel free to submit your own ratings, check out the rankings from me and other visitors, see what sodas are available near you and more. make a float, tap a keg or mix some extract up and enjoy!

anthony (me) started reviewing root beer related drinks in '96 but has always loved the delicious joy of root beer and birch beer and just kept it going ever since. if you have any suggestions of features you'd like to see or sodas you want reviewed, let me know!

Roots Pizza Root Beer

i am very much in favor of things like this, restaurants with one location making their own root beer. that is dedication to your cause. especially if that cause is root beer, but also if it is just providing good food and drinks to the world. i suspect the latter is more their thing, whereas the former is mine. so be it, we intersect here.
so there is no info at all on this label seems is very strange. just "Roots Root Beer" with a very toothy smiling guy in a hat being engulfed in bubbles of some sort. no ingredients, no nutritional info, no website, nothing else. i would think that against the law but i have no idea. i will trust it is all edible and not some sort of deadly poisonous acid or something. well, any more than other sodas are not those things but i don't want to debate the evils of soda right now so onward!
i have to say this is one of the longest lasting heads i have seen. it just sits there and hangs out a long time. that is probably the most unique thing about it. the flavor itself is fine but pretty run of the mill. perhaps a little weak even. it would be a good soda to have with pizza which is the intended audience of a pizza place serving root beer so in that they did well. yet i think they could have made it awesome on its own and still great with pizza. it is pretty smooth with a touch of a creamy feel but it is more a backend thing, after the swallow it is creamy. beforehand it is pretty standard smooth root beer flavor. the carbonation level is nice, not too sharp or too flat. i have nearly finished my bottle and i am still trying to describe the flavor better. it is just there, being good but not great.
Anthony's Rating: 78
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Frankenmuth Brewery Frankie’s Root Bier

this was a very elusive soda also! i just don't like knowing there is a root beer out there and i can't get it. especially when it goes on for a while. one never knows when a soda will stop being made and just disappear. luckily Brad came through and got me a bottle. hooray!
i like the graphic design here, with a dachshund and a shadowy guy drinking a stein of something with a gold, red, black and orange color scheme. the back has a tale about how the brewery used to bred Dachshunds also but made a root beer in order to bride some kid to take care of them as they got sick of doing it. seems pretty bogus to me but who knows?
this one is made with beet sugar, which i have enjoyed before. now whether or not it imparts a different taste than cane sugar i have no idea, i will leave that to others to decide. so i hope for this one to be tasty also.
oh wow, it really is not good. ick. it is bitter and sharp and just not yummy. the vanilla is kind of there in the background if i think about it a lot but on the whole it is not smooth or creamy or anything close to such things. this may be one of the worst glass bottled root beers i have had. i feel bad for the kid who took this as a bribe to take care of the dogs. he certainly got the short end of that stick. it is possible i got a bad bottle so if i do find this again i will try it but it doesn't seem rancid or spoiled. and the carbonation is very much there so the cap was not loose or anything like that. sadness prevails. i will chalk this up to it being a "root bier" instead of a "root beer" as that helps me sleep better at night. not so much a help to my daytime napping though i must admit. alas.
Ingredients:carbonated water, michigan beet sugar, pure vanilla, natural and artificial flavors, malto-dextrin, propylene glycol

Anthony's Rating: 45
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Gnome Draft Style Root Beer Flavour Extract

Well, it is time again to return to the world of extracts! The bottled soda supply is low, yet the extract queue is getting longer. I always feel like it is a lot of work to concoct these brews and sometimes it is, but often not so much. I decided to also return to the world of gnomes at the same time. the company seems to be known more for their birch extract, which i reviewed about a year ago. It was rather tasty so the bar is set.
the extract came with a recipe in it. but scaling down their recipe from 2.5 gallons of water to 1 quart was a little tricky but not all that bad as 1 quart is 1/10 of 2.5 gallons. division by 10 i can do, even if i nearly failed linear math in college. that stuff is just confusing and bizarre though so whatever. I am always surprised just how little extract one uses to make this stuff. less than 1/2 teaspoon to a quart of water seems so tiny. well, that is what they say, let's do it.
the taste is pretty creamy, smooth but not as flavorful as I'd like. i think i even put more than their recommended amount of extract in as i expect it to be too weak anyway. nonetheless it is tasty on the whole. as with most extracts, they don't really get crazy and instead go for the "standard" flavor. that is fine but a little boring in the end. it tastes like what you would hope for. this would probably be good for baking more than actual soda making in my mind. i mean, if it tastes like generic root beer, why do through the hassle of making it instead of buying a 3l bottle for 89 cents? well, besides controlling what sweetener is used and how much i suppose.
Ingredients:water, caramel color, natural and artificial flavorings, alcohol, proplyne glycol. contains sulfites

Anthony's Rating: 65
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Valkyrie Brewing Co. JD’s Old Fashioned Root Beer

i made a trade recently with a root beer maniac named Brad. this was one of the sodas included in that trade. unfortunately it did not survive the mailing to me. even more unfortunate was that that was his last bottle. so i found the brewery info and asked if i could buy some myself. they were happy to send me a six pack for the cost of postage, which was super awesome.
the label is very simple, a beige label with black text. the root beer name in a large old style font and the other required info in a smaller black font. it works well and serves the purpose. it comes across as old fashioned which was the intention i assume.
the flavor here is somewhere between Weeping Radish and Bud's Homemade, it is very licorice dominated. i like licorice so this is fine by me. it also has a very low carbonation level which is not the worst thing but i do like a little more bubble if possible. there are other herbs and spice present too, i think some cinnamon and a bit of clove too. it is well sweetened also, treading the line between covering up that herbal taste which is yummy and making the herbal stuff be too dominant and bitter. so kudos on that Valkyrie people. it is an excellent soda, not your usual root beer taste and i commend them on venturing outside the boundaries a bit.
Anthony's Rating: 93
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