Hires root beer, with vodka mixed in!  They sell this in a can, pre-mixed, at the liquor store.  Slightly thinner colour than usual root beer — it’s actually semi-transparent.

It smells like Hires root beer, but with paint thinner mixed in!  The flavour is not complex, and it’s a touch sweeter than I would like.  Not bad, bad basic.  It has an aftertaste of distillation column.

It’s hard to imagine drinking more than a couple of these at a party (think of all the sugar!), but it’s not a bad thing to have in the fridge.  If I was designing a root beer alcoholic drink, I would take a “root beer cocktail” approach, like adding root beer extract to a martini.  But if you just want to buy a can of something, you could do worse.

Bear ‘N Beaver… So Canadian, OR SO IT SEEMS!  But to bears and beavers really hang out together?  NO!  And if they did, would they do it over top of a brown-tone Union Jack?  NO!  Does it matter?  Not really… the label is actually pretty nice.

On the clear side (fairly transparent).  Rootbeery nose with no other obvious tones.  Taste is surprisingly effervescent, despite it having few bubbles in the glass.  The description on the bottle claims it’s the “ceramist recipe”, but I disagree — it’s more on the acidic side.  They added yucca root extract to make it more “authentic,” whatever that means.

This root beer is made in White Rock, BC, Canada, by a company called “Double D Beverage”.

www.bearnbeaver.com

I found this empty bottle of Bulldog underneath my bed today.  I don’t remember drinking it.  It must have consumed it late one night, smelling of booze, a little fuzzy-eyed, and then let the bottle drop there, unnoticed, until now.

I don’t recall anything about this root beer.  I don’t even recall drinking it.  Maybe I wrote something down, but it hasn’t surfaced yet.  If I knew where to buy another bottle, I would pick up another one and give it a fair review.  But considering how widely I roam to find these things, it could have been from anywhere.

So here’s my assessment: an excellent post-bar root beer.

We found this root beer for sale at a cycling shop and tourist stand at the end of a 100 km cycling day down Quebec’s Route Verte #1. It’s made in Richmond, Quebec, only a few km from where we’re sitting. It’s “100% Naturel”, and is made of “Appalachien Mountains spring water”, plus colourings and flavourings.

The aroma and flavour are definitely on the creamy side. The flavour is traditional root beer with a bit of licorice. The aftertaste is mild (good thing), and it’s not too sweet. It’s not terribly complex, though. The branding is excellent – shortie bottle, and none of that “Ye olde time” nonsense.

Disclaimer: I’m really tired, thirsty and dirty from a day of bike riding, so I can’t guarantee I haven’t been swayed in this review by thirst and gratitude for the rest.

Made in Quebec, Canada. www.bulls-head.com

River City Root Beer is a classic – made by root beer people for the root beer crowd, with little awareness of the flash-pow marketing normally coupled with soda sales.  The front of the label is laughably bad (I suspect it was made in Microsoft Office 2000 using clip art), but the back has an adorable iconographic set of instructions for making a root beer float.

The flavour is robust, but not particularly complex.  It has a classic flavour profile, and does not attempt to gussy it up with the newfangled concepts of the designer soda world.  I agree that it would be great for a root beer float — old fashioned and to the point.  My dad would appreciate this root beer.

Bought in Portland, Oregon, USA.  www.bluedogbeverage.com