Old Town Root Beer 66

The Pooj plans his route.

(Old Town Root Beer Company, June 2011)

One thing we learned during a recent road trip along Route 66 is that root beer is as much a part of its imagery as the cars carrying the root beer drinkers. This probably owes to the drive-in car-hop culture that still holds sway in the more touristy stretches of the Mother Road, and of course where we have drive-ins, we have burgers, malts, and root beer floats. I’ll have much more on that in a later posting about said road trip, but I figured a good precursor to that post would be some Route 66 imagery from my first Root Beer Field Trip to the Old Town Root Beer Company. While Old Town did at one point have branches along Route 66, both in Chicago and Barstow, research seems to indicate that their only remaining store is the one in Temecula, far from this home-brew’s namesake. But root beer is root beer, and far be it for me to judge one by its location of origin, current or otherwise. My job, as far as I’m concerned, is just to drink it, and so drink it I did.

Like Old Town’s original brew, Old Town Root Beer 66 has a good blend of root-y flavors and a smooth texture. The latter is probably from honey, similar to the original brew, except there’s no real honey flavor here, and from there the two brews continue diverging slightly. Overall, this version is milder than the original, less sweet, with a less pronounced herb flavor that starts with licorice and ends with wintergreen birch, culminating in a subtle heat from some added cinnamon (not in the original). Whether the licorice or wintergreen birch dominates changes a bit from sip to sip, but the scent is noticeably cinnamon-y and vanilla-y throughout.

All in all, I did like Old Town Root Beer 66 well enough, but not quite as much as I like their flagship beverage. While the original Old Town stands up well even with a big dollop of ice cream dropped in it, I doubt that I would be able to discern much root were they to use Old Town Root Beer 66 in their floats. But like I said, I still liked it well enough, so I’ll give it a solid 3.5.