Dad's (with Sugar)

The Pooj wonders why you don’t call or write more often.

(Galco’s, July 2011)

Dad’s Old Fashioned Root Beer is one of several Chicago-based root beers I’ve been running into recently, which makes me think I should visit Chicago soon, it being such a big root beer town and all. The fact that it’s where Route 66 begins is no small draw either, so I’ll have to file it away in the road-trips-to-do list. Like many other brew-masters, Barney Berns and Ely Klapman, the latter to which belong both the eponymous father and the basement where the beverage was developed, got things started in the 1930s. In the 1940s, Dad’s became the first beverage to be sold in the now-ubiquitous six-pack. Each bottle in said six-pack was a 7 or 10 oz. “Junior” size, with quart-sized “Mama” and half-gallon “Papa” marketed as the rest of the family tree.

That would make the current 12 oz. packaging an adolescent sibling, I suppose…

As I had mentioned in an earlier post, Dad’s was until recently made with real sugar. While the 1- and 2-liter bottles and most of the glass bottles are now made with HFCS, there still are glass bottles out there with sugar-sweetened contents. These are a little harder to find in California except in some root beer gift boxes/variety packs that have made their way into stores as of late, with single bottles sometimes available in smaller specialty stores. You can usually distinguish the sugar from the HFCS variety by simply looking at the label – the sugar variety has a paper label whereas the HFCS variety has a clear plastic decal label, with slight variations in the graphics of the two.

Either Dad’s sugar-sweetened formula or my tastes have changed since the last time I had one (probably me), because I am actually quite pleased with this version. It certainly benefits from some added smoothness compared to the HFCS recipe, as well as a deeper, richer flavor. While the scent is very heavily menthol-y, the taste is much more on the licorice and slightly more on the molasses sides of the spectrum. There seems to be some combination of cloves or nutmeg, possibly even cinnamon in there somewhere, but I can’t clearly pinpoint any one in particular – the clove flavor is a little stronger, but again, not so much that I could clearly identify it as such, and thus can only really characterize it as having a slight “harvest spice” taste to it. Overall, it’s root-y, even bark-y in a good way, though the sugary sweetness tends to overpower the herbs. Flavors progress from primarily sweet to primarily herb-y the further I get in the bottle, and the molasses flavor builds a little higher than I would prefer with each successive sip.

Still, I liked Dad’s Old Fashioned Root Beer. If the sugar didn’t drown out the herbs as much, and if that ever-increasing molasses flavor wasn’t there, I think I would like it even more. Not really an everyday brew for me, but certainly not one I’d avoid as much as I used to either – that’ll make it a 3.5.