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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.

Filbert’s Old Time Quality Diet Root Beer

i reviewed the regular root beer from Filbert’s long ago. funny as the place i ordered it from is no longer in business and the place i ordered this from stopped doing mail order kind of in the middle of processing my order resulting in me only getting about 1/2 of what i ordered. that of course meant i got all of the diet sodas and only one regular one. oh well, i will just have to find another way to get the others i guess. more questing…
i was immediately struck by the label on this bottle, it seems almost fake, as if someone photocopied a real label onto regular paper and glued it on bottles of their own stuff. it is like at the local flea market where the people have bootleg cds with color photocopies of the real covers. but this is actually quite clear and precise so i am sure it is really what it says it is. it is just a very matte finish look, unlike any other i have seen, except maybe a couple of home brews i have had. i doubt this would stand up to water in any way. oh well.
i am always shocked when i see anything made with saccharin these days, i thought it was found to be both disgusting and not good for you. it served its purpose in 1977 to flavor Tab or whatever but there are better options these days. but perhaps not in the mind of Filbert’s.
frankly this is not good. as i expected it would not be. it tastes awful in that way only a diet drink can, very harsh and metallic and bitter. i would never buy this if i could not drink sugared drinks and especially won’t while i still can. their regular soda is tasty though, so check that out. plus the name “filbert’s” is pretty cool for some reason.
Ingredients:carbonated water, sodium gluconate, carmel color, sodium saccharin (8.9mg per fl oz), natural & artificial flavors, sodium benzoate (Preservative)

Anthony’s Rating: 18
User’s Rating: 0
# of ratings:0
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Fitz’s Diet Premium Micro-Brewed Root Beer

if it were not for that awful aftertaste, this would be ok. i seem to be saying a similar thing for many of the diet sodas i have reviewed lately (can you tell i have been putting off buying and reviewing these things? still have a few to go for bear with me.) so yeh, that metallic, weird aftertaste just ruins it for me. kind of creamy and it even tastes remotely like root beer! but it still is diet and you can tell. sadly.
Ingredients:carbonated water, aspartame, caramel color, vanillin, natural flavors, potassium sorbate, sodium benzoate (preservative), and citric acid

Anthony’s Rating: 36
User’s Rating: 68
# of ratings:8
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Fletcher Street Brewing Co RipSaw Diet Root Beer

i find it quite strange that: first, this is a diet soda that has a non diet sweetener and second, there is no nutrition info on it. i thought that was not legal. even more than that i would guess that people who drink diet sodas probably care about how many calories their drink has and probably assume that a “diet” drink has none. yet this must have some with the maltodextrin and all.
granted there are a couple of diet sodas that have a combo of sweeteners, some of which are not non-caloric. i know Sprecher does a Lo-Cal soda that does this. they did it much better too. this is just gross. there is nothing here to tell me it is root beer. i taste metal and that is about all. except for that whole tongue-getting-stuck thing, this is probably what the kid in “A Christmas Story” who licked the flag pole tasted once he was removed and junk. i had hoped i would enjoy this more. yet i did not. they seem like a cool company and their root beer was decent enough. if you want a diet drink though, you should steer clear of this one, in my opinion. feel free to express your own feelings in the comments, i could be all wrong. i do hate diet sodas in general so perhaps someone who enjoys such things thinks this is the bee’s proverbial knees.
Ingredients:carbonated water, splenda, maltodextrine, carmel color, sodium benzoate (preservative), natural and artificial flavors, and citric acid

Anthony’s Rating: 18
User’s Rating: 36
# of ratings:5
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Foodtown Old Fashioned Diet Root Beer

ok, so i am back from a brief pause in the root beer action. i went and got married which took a good amount of time away from other endeavors. i am sure you can imagine. and then we honeymooned and i did my best to find new brews to review but came up empty in the caribbean. there was a lot of ginger beer, which i also love, but no root or birch. alas.
this is all irrelevant to the soda in my hand of course but i suppose i am delaying writing about it as it is diet and i am not a big fan of diet drinks in general. this one being no exception either.
both of my issues with diet sodas come into play with this beverage, one more than the other in this case. first i always feel like diet drinks have much less taste than their full-on sugared brethren. that is very much the case here, it barely tastes like anything. the second issue is the awful aftertaste. and actually this drink does not have that nearly as much as other diet sodas. not that having less of a bad thing equals a good thing of course, it is just a smaller bad thing, but that is something i suppose.
it is hardly recognizable as root beer but perhaps i like the sensitivity to pick it up in diet sodas for some reason…
if you must drink diet, you could do worse than this is the bottom line.
Ingredients:carbonated water, carmel color, aspertame, natural & artificial flavors, sodium, citric acid and sodium benzoate (a preservative), acacia, phenylketonurics

Anthony’s Rating: 33
User’s Rating: 79
# of ratings:4
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Frostie Diet Root Beer

*sigh* why do diet sodas have to be gross? and give me a stomach ache pretty much immediately? i really thought that sucralose (Splenda) was a better option, but it clearly is not that much better judging from this brew right here. Frostie is such an exalted name in root beer circles. well, i think it must be. or it might be. if there are any root beer circles. i wouldn’t know myself i suppose, being outside of all that, or perhaps being my own little circle. so yeh, this is not so good. it tastes a little more like root beer than a lot of diet ones do, but it still does not taste all that much like it. the one good thing here is that the bottle is quite cool. fun labels, embossed “Frostie” logo in the glass around the neck, that is cool. i suppose this is sort of the opposite case of the Kutztown Root Beer I reviewed earlier, this one has a craptacular liquid in a cool packge, that one had a very tasty beverage in a cool, yet grammatically wrong package. but hey, it has no carbs! woo hoo, rejoice that we can swill crap and think we are doing good for ourselves somehow.
Anthony’s Rating: 22
User’s Rating: 53
# of ratings:4
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Frostop Diet Root Beer

my golly gosh, the things i do for the internet tubes! drinking diet sodas! alright, i am going to try to do this review by consuming the absolute minimum amount of beverage that i have to. partly since i have yet to meet a diet soda that i like and partly (and mainly) because i just took a sip of this foul swill and i’d like to not have to do that too much more. i also just read about what the heck “acesulfame-k” is and i think i would prefer to not have much of it inside of me. i actually had to modify my database to add that one in to the ‘sweetener’ catagory. wacky that after 330 or whatever sodas i find one with a new type of sweetener.
ok, so i took another sip, it goes like this: comes in my mouth, i think “hhmm, ok, not bad, well, not anything really, it is just wet.” it slides over my tongue more, i think “alright, there is really nothing here, how can this be called root beer at all? oh wait, here comes that familiar rooty something! nope, i was wrong, here comes vile slop taste.” and i make a face and say “ug, that is gross!” so after two sips i think i can say i am done. this tastes like badness, not root beer, i am sorry to say that. i pity the diabetics of the world sometimes when this is what they have to consume. for a second i think it might be alright but, as always, that aftertaste kicks in early and stays there.
Anthony’s Rating: 20
User’s Rating: 58
# of ratings:6
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Goose Island Diet Root Beer

ok, so i can’t find the review right now, please hold…
Ingredients:carbonated water, caramel color, natural and artificial flavor, malic acid, sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate (preservatives), acesulfame-K, sucralose

Anthony’s Rating: 40
User’s Rating: 31
# of ratings:3
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Gray’s Great American Diet Root Beer

ok, so i have a lot of diet root beers to go through, live with it! hey wait, this is diet?! well, the aftertaste is there a little but otherwise this is pretty regular tasting. even more so than the Sprecher Lo-Cal Root Beer from yesterday. which does not mean it is in fact good or even tastes much like root beer, but it is decent. for diabetics and those on a diet. i would still probably go for the Diet Saranac if i was on a diet, but who really knows, some people may prefer this one. i don’t quite see how. maybe if i had it with a slice of pizza it would taste more root beer-like or something. ok, now that it is not as cold i can kind of taste something. a little creamines, a little bitterness, a little zing. i don’t know. not terrible, but i’d prefer the real stuff.
Ingredients:carbonated water, caramel coloring, citric acid, aspertame 6 Nutrasweet brand, artificial and natural flavorings, and sodium benzoate

Anthony’s Rating: 46
User’s Rating: 63
# of ratings:2
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Hank’s Premium Philadelphia Diet Root Beer

it is rather annoying that i had to mail order this as i live about an hour from philadelphia but i have never seen this variety so i broke down & ordered. as with most diet sodas, it seems ok the first 2.4 seconds, then the awful fake sweetener taste kicks in and it is just vile. granted they do try to make it work here. yet it does not. a little creamy, lots of carbonation to tickle your mouth, yet the taste is no good, slightly bitter and then that terrible aftertaste comes in. i can’t even finish it. i feel bad but i just can’t deal with diet soda.
Ingredients:filtered carbonated water, caramel color, natural and artificial flavors, aspartame, sodium benzoate (a preservative), quillaia and yucca extracts, citric acid and acacia

Anthony’s Rating: 20
User’s Rating: 55
# of ratings:13
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Hansen’s Creamy Diet Root Beer

i want to like Hansen’s. really i do. they were featured on the episode of Modern Marvels that i was on, they do the all natural thing, they seem like good people. but their products just are not great. sadly, this is added to that list. but it is a diet beverage, so i suppose that is to be expected from me.
the design of the can is pretty good. a tasty looking foamy mug of root beer with a straw in it is featured along with lots of info on what is NOT in here (preservatives, sodium, aspartame, caffeine, sugar, carbs) and the colorful Hansen’s logo with some diagonal pinstripes to fill in the white background. i guess that whiteness indicates it is diet sort of, all pure and free and fresh or something? i don’t know, just guessing.
there is really nothing “creamy” about this drink. it is harsh and kind of bitter going in and stays that way. it tastes kind of like diet root beer, which tastes nothing like regular root beer. it may be no calories, but at what cost? is it worth losing all taste and then adding back in a vile taste that only resembles the original taste if you lost 98% of your taste buds at some point through a too hot pizza cheese incident or something equally horrific. hooray, no sugar! bummer, metallic flavor… wow, no sodium! aw geez, tummy ache…. coolio no carbs! aaahh shucks, gotta rinse my mouth. do what you want and i will do what i want and i want to not drink this anymore.
Ingredients:pure triple filtered carbonated water, caramel color, potassium citrate, phosphoric acid, sucralose, acesulfame potassium, natural flavors (licorice root extracts, madagascan vanilla, wintergreen, anise), acacia

Anthony’s Rating: 19
User’s Rating: 0
# of ratings:0
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