Jananas

We spent today playing with fibre (me) and computers (Jason) and decided that our hard work should be rewarded with some more root beer. Sprecher Root Beer is a micro-brewery founded in 1985 and located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I’m not sure when they ventured into the realm of sodas, but they do have a full line of gourmet sodas. Our friend had grabbed two bottles of Sprechers for us – one Root Beer Soda and one Lo-Cal Root Beer (sorry for the not great shot, my camera didn’t feel like cooperating).

Before we had even opened this bottles, they’d already stolen a little piece of my heart. They are big and sturdy and feel good in your hand. In fact, they are so big that they contain an entire pint! Even better, the labels say that they are “non-alcoholic”. That just made me laugh in the ‘really, who made that mistake?’ sort of way.

We opened our bottles up and they both had that amazing minty root beer aroma. The normal version is sweetened with high fructose corn syrup (gross!), but also has raw Wisconsin honey. Not entirely sure about how those two fit together, but… this root beer was good. It was full bodied (more on the minty side) without being overwhelmingly sweet. It had a subtle mint aftertaste without being overbearing.

The lo-cal version was good. It was tasty without being sweet. It had high fructose corn syrup, raw honey, and sodium saccharin as sweeteners. Thankfully there wasn’t that gross artificial sweetener taste or aftertaste. In fact, this diet root beer soda was so good that even Jason gave it two thumbs up – a first so far in our challenge!

We both liked this root beer. And although it isn’t our top choice overall, if you’re going to pick one sweetened with high fructose corn syrup I’d make it a Sprecher’s.

In fact, we enjoyed this root beer so much that we finished our taste testing off with root beer floats. Glad to say that this root beer passes that test as well!