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Hello and welcome to the oldest, largest and frankly the best root beer reviewing site in the world! i also throw in birch beer and sarsaparilla review while i am at it. 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 soda review publishes every monday with the occasional random post or review of root beer related stuff. 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. anthony (me) started reviewing sodas in ’96 but has always loved the delicious joy of root beer and birch beer.

Jones Diet Root Beer

i am not quite sure why this soda was so hard to find. actually finding specific Jones Soda flavors in general is difficult. i don’t see the regular root beer all that often. or when i am in the mood for a foofoo berry, i can’t find that. stores seem to pick a couple of random flavors and stock them. or maybe they just don’t sell and sit on the shelf? i doubt that, seems a waste of shelf space and stores are supposedly very aware of exact turnover of all stock.
you probably know about Jones Soda by now. they are the ones who have different photos on their labels, may of them sent in by the public at large. so that is fun. you can even order soda with any photo you want to put on them. that is handy for weddings or birth announcements or break ups or cookie decorating or whatever occasion you want custom labelled soda for. they now seem to have fortunes stolen from actual fortune cookies under the caps. which is fine i guess but they invite you to send in ones you found also, which seems to extend the laziness. they can’t take their own photos or get their own fortune cookie fortunes now. i guess next they will invite you to send in your own paper for the label or perhaps you own bottles or maybe your own soda to fill it. lazy kids these days…
so whatever, this drink is not good. there is barely any root beer taste to it. blindfolded, i don’t think i would know it was supposed to be root beer to be honest. it does have a gross metallic taste though! so if you are looking for a steel flavored carbonated beverage, here you go, find this and you are set. maybe if they DID have people send in soda it would be tastier. ok, it is not spit-out level bad but it is not even decent.
Ingredients:carbonated water, caramel color, natural and artificial flavors, phosphoric acid, sucralose, sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate (as preservatives)

Anthony’s Rating: 31
User’s Rating: 0
# of ratings:0
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Big Ben’s Red Birch Beer

usually red birch beers come in a brown glass bottle for whatever reason. because of that, i often have to figure out it is actually red or if it is really brown in there. but this one leaves nothing to the imagination at all. it is definitely red. very red. so red that later, when i am not thinking about what i drank today i will pee and get a little scared for a second. probably not, but maybe. that happens with beets though. it makes one wonder just where all this dye goes instead of out of me. hhhmmmm.
the taste here is probably the same as the white, brown, golden and blue, but i will pretend it is different. this one seems a bit more watery. the main taste is a solid wintergreen. my friend who sits across from me at work tried this, never having had birch beer before and he said it tastes like mouthwash. which is not so far off i suppose, just much sweeter. if you like that and always have to stop your urge to swallow after swishing instead of spitting in the sink, this is up your alley. it even has the total lack of carbonation of mouthwash. i actually quite enjoy wintergreen myself so i am ok with all of this.
Ingredients:carbonated water, sugar and/or corn sweetener, natural and artificially flavored, caramel, red #40 or blue#1 except white

Anthony’s Rating: 82
User’s Rating: 0
# of ratings:0
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Olde Heritage Root Beer

so i finally broke down and decided i was not going to just find Kutztown White Birch Beer in my travels and that i needed to mail order some. of course i did some searching to get the best price. shipping bottles of soda is quite costly and small companies are usually not too keen on sending free review samples out. most often it is cheapest to buy right from the company but in this case i happened to find another site that sold the desired soda. plus they carried this one too! whoa, a local home brew! crazy! and very cool too of course. i do worry a bit about the fermentation level as it is yeast carbonated, but i won’t get overly concerned about it. as an even cooler bonus, they had shoo fly pies! i love me some shoo fly pie! the one i got was mediocre i will admit though. hopefully it did not set a precedent for stuff purchased in the same order.

anyway, getting to the drink at hand… after a few sips of this, i just can’t bring myself to drink much more. it is just so overwhelmingly yeasty. i don’t like yeast carbonated drinks as much as other carbonation methods it seems anyway but this takes it to another level. perhaps that is historically what root beer was like but it is not what my mouth buds like. i don’t even taste the root beer flavor. i really REALLY want to like this and support a homebrewer and so on but i can’t. it is gross. perhaps it is just this bottle. i do have another at home i will sample too. perhaps it is the shipping time made it carbonate more. or perhaps i should be mixing it up more as there is a lot of sediment on the bottom. i think that would make it even yeastier though. oh well, can’t win em all! the head is pretty nice, that is a bonus. the aftertaste does not linger terribly long either, so that is another plus i suppose.
Ingredients:water, sugar, root beer extract, yeast

Anthony’s Rating: 6
User’s Rating: 0
# of ratings:0
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Kutztown White Birch Beer

i am fairly sure this is the same as the Kutztown Red Birch but without the coloring. the ingredient list even is exactly the same, including the caramel color even, which is obviously not in this one really. i think this because i read it somewhere on the internet tubes and if that stuff is not all factual then i am a monkey’s uncle. actually it is on the Kutztown website itself, strange. as i had that belief, i did not rush to order this but as i am running out of sodas to review now, i have to resort to getting this sort of thing. whatever, don’t judge, you go find 520 sodas and get back to me.
but you know what? this tastes different than the red birch to me. i got some of the red also when i got the white and this one is definitely a little more watered down and bit more minty. i do like the wintergreen mintiness, but the rest of the flavor being lacking and weak makes me mark this lower than i would have hoped. white birches are usually very solid drinks and this one is decent but not quite good enough.
Ingredients:triple-filtered carbonated water, pure cane sugar, caramel color, natural and artificial flavor, citric acid, sodium benzoate (a preservative), yucca extractives and acacia

Anthony’s Rating: 81
User’s Rating: 70
# of ratings:1
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