Steelhead Brewing Co. Spicy Draft

It comes in gallons??!!??!!??

(Steelhead Brewing Co. – Irvine, May 2012)

Deep within the recesses of a nondescript white cardboard box, on the wrong side of the fine line between hobby and obsession, an ungodly amount of root beer lies in wait…

Actually, the even more nondescript plastic jug inside the white cardboard box looked like it was going to start leaking air soon, so I had to decant its contents into every usable bottle I could find in the house in an effort to keep said contents fresh. Consequently, there are a lot of randomly-sized bottles of root beer floating around the fridge. This is, of course, in addition to the non-random normal-sized bottles of root beer and other assorted specialty sodas already camping out on the bottom shelf…

Not that I’m complaining…

In any event, as promised a long time back, I finally returned to Steelhead Brewing Company to sample their second root beer offering, their so-called Spicy Draft Root Beer (as opposed to their bottled Honey-Vanilla variety), which comes straight from the tap. Since my schedule as of late hasn’t allowed much leftover time for recreational root beer drinking/rhetoric (that, and I’ve been trying to shed a few pounds, a goal to which recreational root beer drinking would seem contrary) (the rhetoric should still be fine though), I figured my first post-hiatus root beer should be worthy of the long wait, and thus the sheer volume of Steelhead’s Spicy Draft should at least make for a monumental return. While they do have growlers for their beers, Steelhead apparently will only sell Spicy Draft Root Beer to-go in the gallon box (which would qualify as the largest single container of root beer I have purchased to date) that you see before you.

Before we get too far down the road, and because I neglected to do so last time, here’s a little background on the Steelhead Brewing Company: Steelhead is the brainchild of five individuals with overlapping backgrounds in real estate, shoe imports, hotels, lumber, banking, accounting, and restaurants. While I’m not sure when root beer first showed up on the company radar, Steelhead’s beer brewery started development in 1988, eventually opening its Eugene, OR doors to the public in early 1991. Since then, they’ve added branches in Burlingame, CA and Irvine, CA, where I acquired this particular gallon box of Spicy Draft Root Beer. The Steelhead Root Beer website says that their root beer was developed through nine test runs during the course of two years, but they do not delineate which of those batches became the Honey Vanilla variety and which became the Spicy Draft we are talking about today.

They certainly aren’t lying when they call it spicy. It has that old-fashioned root beer flavor, but with a very heavy licorice taste and scent, the latter of which permeates the entire kitchen simply from the empty gallon jug sitting in the sink, making the entire place smell like root beer (best air freshener ever). Other flavors are very strong as well – wintergreen menthol that carries into the aftertaste, a more than slightly bitter herb kick that also resolves into a bark-y aftertaste. For lack of better terms, it’s thick – the flavors are firmly on the other side of too strong, as if it's still too concentrated, which, given that it comes straight from the tap, may have been a possibility for this particular batch. Even though I generally like my root beers on the bolder end of the spectrum, it's hard to drink it without wanting to cut it with something.

Perhaps cutting it with some additional carbonated water would improve it since it almost tastes flat. The Steelhead website says that it is intentionally “softly carbonated,” but I don’t know if it’s supposed to be as soft as I’m experiencing it right now. I suspect that the gallon box did leak air, but the only way to know for sure is to have a glass in the restaurant where presumably there would be no opportunity to lose carbonation before drinking. So far I think I like Steelhead’s Honey-Vanilla version better, which again is slightly unusual since that’s much sweeter and milder in comparison to the Spicy Draft, and I have tended to gravitate towards stronger and less sweet brews in the past. But again, it's hard to say whether or not my perception is clouded by the possibility that it may have lost its carbonation.

Steelhead Spicy Draft is definitely not a chugging root beer, and is actually much more pleasant when it’s sipped. In smaller doses, it still has a bitter taste, but with a sweeter finish that smoothes over some of the sharper edges. That having been said, it’s hard to recommend a beverage that requires such effort just to enjoy drinking it, so all I’ll say is that if you like Barq’s, you might like this, but if you like A&W, you definitely will not.

My conclusion then is that I might like this once in a while, pending a second taste at the source. Or maybe I’m more of a root beer weakling than I’d care to admit... Either way, at least for now, I only like Steelhead Brewing Co. Spicy Draft Root Beer well enough to give it a low 3.