The Pooj just smiled and gave me a root beer.Today we celebrate Australia Day – commemorating the First Fleet’s arrival at Sydney Cove way back in 1788 – with an Australian import: Bundaberg Root Beer!
Let me begin by saying that Bundaberg Ginger Beer is my favorite ginger ale to date, so I was hoping for something equally favorable in the root beer department. However, as much as I wanted to like Bundaberg Root Beer, I just couldn’t. Maybe it’s my American preconceptions (or Chinese preconceptions at any rate…) telling me that root beer needs to taste a certain way, and this is perhaps exactly what an Australian root beer should taste like, but there’s just way too much of a molasses flavor for me. There’s an actual “root beer brew” listed pretty high in the ingredients that’s made up of the typical line up of root beer herbs I’ve encountered thus far, so you would expect more of that to come though. Yet all I really taste is ginger and molasses – so this is more like a molasses ginger ale to me, complete with the lingering heat that I like in my ginger ale (without the molasses, of course). If the aftertaste was just a little heat, that wouldn’t be so bad, but there’s also a slightly sour taste that lingers along with the ginger, leaving everything tasting more than slightly medicinal.
I hate to do it, but Bundaberg only gets a 1.5.
Root beer aside, as you may already know, Australia has had some wicked flooding as of late in Victoria and in Bundaberg’s home-state of Queensland. If you feel so compelled, please donate towards relief efforts: Victoria, Queensland.
No comments:
Post a Comment