AJ Stephans

The Pooj knows your name.

(BevMo Pasadena, June 2011)

Here’s a bit of trivia for you: the person that owns and operates AJ Stephans is not named AJ Stephans. Rather, Jeff Rose named the company after a combination of his children’s and his own names. The beverages he creates, on the other hand, have his family name written all over them – 200 recipes handed down from Jeff’s grandfather. Although the bottle says that they’re from Boston, the company actually started in Maine, and presumably still uses unprocessed water from an artesian spring near Providence. While their signature brew is supposedly their Ginger Beer, we are, of course, not the Stark Raving (Ginger Beer) Blog! so we’ll stick to their root beer for now.

That turns out to be a good decision, as AJ Stephans Root Beer is quite good. Initial sips can be a bit biting due to a hard, almost burning carbonation – in fact, that’s pretty much the only thing holding it back from a higher rating. Ordinarily, letting a bottle sit opened for a few minutes can release enough of the carbonation to remove any unpleasantness, which holds true here, except that once the carbonation starts to go, it goes pretty fast. So wait a little bit after opening it to enjoy it, but enjoy it quickly thereafter. Flavor-wise, it leans towards the wintergreen side, and the wintergreen carries through to the slightly menthol-y aftertaste. Wintergreen is also dominant in the scent, so I can confidently say that it tastes pretty much exactly like it smells. Texture-wise, it’s pretty rich and pretty smooth once you get past the shock of the initial carbonation. Sugar-wise, it’s just sweet enough – not too much, but not bitter either. Although wintergreen is dominant, it plays well with some vanilla and sassafras tones.

All in all, a good root beer – I give AJ Stephans a solid 4.

Virgil's Special Edition Bavarian Nutmeg

So the Missus and I moved recently, which in and of itself is not newsworthy, but I mention anyways because it seems that I learned during the moving process where the line between hobby and mental illness/obsession is drawn. Amidst all the other things we had to pack and move, I moved no fewer than 27 bottles of root beer, two of which were pint-bottles and therefore larger than your typical bottle of root beer, and one of which was a bottle of sarsaparilla, which we may or may not call root beer for the purposes of this blog (more to come on that, I promise). To save our collective sanity, I decided to forego moving all of the empty bottles I had collected over the course of my blogging adventure (besides, I typically don’t move empty bottles from one place to the next – I like to keep the physical bottle collection as an artifact of the time I lived at a certain place, and the root beer experiences during that time) (plus I didn’t want to piss off the generous volunteer moving crew were they to realize they had to pick up a 50 lb box of empty glass, unlike certain members of my family who have been known to move entire boxes of pine cones from one county to the next). Even so, my associates know me, and therefore one volunteer mover was kind enough to bring a housewarming gift of even more root beer. Thus we begin our new life at our new address with 30 root beers and one sarsaparilla…

I told myself when we were moving that I would celebrate the completion of our move with a special root beer, so now that we’ve thrown away the last moving box, I can finally crack it open.

Virgil’s Bavarian counterpart makes a new friend.

(Old Town Root Beer Company, June 2011)

You’ll note that Virgil’s Special Edition Bavarian Nutmeg Root Beer is not only special because it says so in its title – it also happens to be the first of the spoils of my root beer field trip last month. No less significant is the fact that it is also, per ounce, the most expensive root beer I have purchased to date (somewhere around $10 per pint…). And it comes in a cool looking ceramic swing-top popper bottle, which may not necessarily justify the financial commitment required to drink it, but should not go unmentioned either...

With the exception of added honey and Bohemian spring water from Bavaria and the deletion of pimento berry oil and balsam oil, Virgil’s Special Edition Bavarian Nutmeg does not appear to be that different from regular Virgil’s, but the differences are actually pronounced. Previously, I said that Virgil’s Root Beer has a distinctive flavor you have to be looking for to enjoy it, so Virgil’s Bavarian Nutmeg is much more accessible by comparison. There is indeed a distinct nutmeg flavor that carries over into the aftertaste along with some heat from either the cinnamon or cassia oil (which, although both come from the same plant, are probably sourced from different places here), but it balances well with the rest of the herbs – anise, licorice (aren’t those two the same thing?), vanilla, cloves, wintergreen, birch, and as I already mentioned, cinnamon and cassia oil. Add some honey and molasses in there and you end up with a very smooth, rich flavor with a balanced amount of sweetness. Unbleached sugar is the primary sweetener, so it not only keeps the honey and molasses from overpowering the flavor, but also adds a nice caramel-y note to the whole thing. With the entire virtual spice rack thrown in there, you would think the finished product would taste more like a Thanksgiving pie (you can certainly pinpoint every herb and spice’s flavor if you’re looking for it), but all ingredients are used deftly to give a full-bodied flavor to the brew.

All in all, the flavor is full, but subtle and creamy at the same time – not mild, just subtle. The stronger flavors here are definitely the requisite root beer herbs: wintergreen, birch, vanilla, and more so licorice and anise, and the added nutmeg is a good break from the norm. Whether or not the Bavarian water adds anything is unclear, though it certainly doesn’t hurt. Jorge Garcia recently deemed Virgil’s Special Edition Bavarian Nutmeg his favorite root beer. I don’t think I would go as far as to say it’s my favorite since I would have preferred a slightly stronger flavor – not a change in the flavor, just more of it – but it’s certainly very good. Maybe I was expecting something transcendent given the hefty price tag. For now, I give it a high 4.

Oogave

The Pooj has loot in the boot.

(BevMo Pasadena, April 2011)

Agave nectar is all the rage right now as an alternative sweetener. Farmed from the agave plant (variations of which are also used to make tequila), the syrup has lower glucose levels than typical sugar as well as fewer calories. Its honey-like consistency also makes it a viable sugar substitute for cooking, mixing into drinks, or simply out of the bottle as pancake syrup. However, the jury is still out on agave nectar’s relative health benefits – the decrease in glucose comes with an overwhelming increase in fructose levels that make it 1-1/2 times sweeter than table sugar (sucrose) and, ironically, given its marketing as a healthy sugar alternative, may in fact render agave nectar just as (un)healthy as we would typically consider HFCS.

But who are we kidding, right? I’m writing this, and presumably you’re reading this, because we drink lots of root beer with cavalier disregard for its potential health foibles. That in mind, on with the show…

Without harping on the debated health benefits of agave nectar, it’s worth noting that Oogave got its start because a natural food restaurateur from Denver decided that serving processed, commercial, HFCS-filled soda at his establishment would be counter to his purpose in opening it to begin with. But because his patrons repeatedly requested soda with their meals, Stephen Anson did the next best thing and started making his own sodas in a variety of creative flavors like watermelon and grapefruit. Anson began to notice that people were coming into his shop for sodas as much as they were coming in for food, so in 2007 he closed the restaurant, bought some production and bottling equipment, and set out full time as a beverage maker.

It’s a great story, so I really want to like the end product. Upon an initial sniff and a subsequent sip, I am glad to report that it doesn’t taste like it smells, because it kind of smells like a urinal cake… Granted, I don’t know what a urinal cake tastes like, but I’m not really planning on doing any more research into that, so let’s just leave that one where it is. As far as whether I would consider it root beer – not at all, really. Oogave’s website says it has “notes of sarsaparilla, vanilla, and horehound,” which sounds like some nice notes, but those notes are played at an extreme pianissimo. More than anything, it comes off as thin and sweet, with only a slight root-y essence rather than an actual root-y flavor.

Relative lack of root beer credentials aside though, Oogave is actually pleasantly light and refreshing. I’d imagine the watermelon and grapefruit varieties (or the strawberry rhubarb, which I actually want to go find now…) would be better suited for such accolades than bold and rich root beer should be. Oogave Root Beer then, gets only a 1.5.

Fitz's

The Pooj wants to arm wrestle for some reason...

(BevMo Pasadena, April 2011)

A couple months ago, my sister asked if we all wanted to meet her in St. Louis for a weekend (heh, meet me in St. Louis…nevermind…). While I’m sure there’s much more to see in St. Louis than the Arch and the Wainwright Building, which I had already seen before, I couldn’t really think of anything else I really wanted to do there (well, except get some barbecued pork products…). More to the point, I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to do there that would have appealed to the rest of my travelling contingent, since I doubt anyone else would have wanted to spend the entire weekend on a tour of all of Adler & Sullivan’s buildings… Or eating barbecued pork products... Now if I knew then that one can watch Fitz’s Root Beer being bottled on a refurbished 1940s bottling line whilst enjoying a burger, I may have been more tempted to make the trip after all (and force everyone to go on the architectural tour with me…).

Fitz’s Drive-In first opened in 1947 in the St. Louis suburb of Richmond Heights. Car-hops served up burgers and house-made root beer until its owner retired and the restaurant closed its doors in 1970. Enterprising locals started re-bottling Fitz’s secret recipe brew back in 1985, later opening up Fitz’s American Grill & Bottling Works in 1993 inside a renovated art deco bank building near Washington University. To keep Fitz’s rooted in its past tradition, the owners carted down an old bottling line from Wisconsin, fixed it up, and installed it in the restaurant where it operates today. Definitely worth another root beer field trip, if you ask me.

Unfortunately, I would pretty much be going just to see the bottling line and try the burgers, since Fitz’s Root Beer is not particularly spectacular. It’s heavy on the vanilla and pretty sweet, but pretty bland when it comes to the herbs. There’s initially a mild wintergreen birch flavor that fades as you get further down the bottle. One thing that doesn’t fade is the vanilla – it lingers a while in the aftertaste. Since we also had another bottle of Olde Brooklyn open, I tried them side by side, resulting in the Olde Brooklyn tasting even more cola-ish to the point of gummy-cola-bottle-ish. Fitz’s tasted more birch-y afterward by comparison, but as soon as my taste buds forgot about New York, St. Louis lost much of its foliage as well, if you catch my drift.

Hopefully the frosty mugs of root beer and gourmet burgers at Fitz’s American Grill & Bottling Works are worth the trip, because right now Fitz’s Root Beer is nothing to leave home for. That’ll get you a 3.

BJ's Brewhouse

The Pooj tries to escape the Phantom Zone.

(BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse, June, 2011)

BJ’s Restaurant and Brewhouse first opened as a deep-dish pizza joint in Santa Ana back in 1978. Since then, they’ve become pretty ubiquitous in Southern California, and have expanded to more than a dozen states throughout the nation. I was surprised to learn that they did not start making beer until 1996 because I’ve become so accustomed to seeing their big brew-vat signs outside their restaurants. Now I’ve actually had BJ’s root beer before, but not in recent memory – thanks to a visiting friend’s hankering for ice cream sandwiches from Diddy Riese across the street (in enemy territory, mind you)(Fight On), we stopped here for a bite and a brew.

First off, it’s served in a big frosted mug, so that’s a good start. Second, it smells heavily of vanilla, with just a mild sarsaparilla/sassafras-y twinge – good for vanilla lovers and not necessarily a deal breaker for herb-y lovers. Third, and this is where it starts getting odd, there’s a two-tiered flavor to it, but not in a taste-and-aftertaste kind of way. It’s almost like your different senses pick up different flavors at the same time. Upon hitting your tongue, it’s sweet and almost cola-ish, with a mild herb-y flavor. A split second after the initial taste, you get a second layer on top of the first taste, kind of traveling up your throat and into your nose (yeah, this doesn’t sound particularly appetizing, I know, but stay with me here) – this one is kind of smoky, like burnt marshmallows or toasted bread, as if the barley and hops somehow made it into the root beer vat as well. The thing is, I can taste both at once, but it’s still oddly separated. Weird...

But if my experience with Anacapa has taught me anything, it’s that I shouldn’t judge a draught root beer by the first glass – maybe just a bad pull or something.

My refill glass is a little better with the flavor blending, at least to the point where I don’t taste two distinctly different flavors at the same time (which begs the question – how what happened the first time…?). The odd part about that is that I don’t really taste either of the flavors from the first glass (I mean, did I get a dirty glass the first time…?), but the flavor is a little more on the root/bark side (that is, sarsaparilla and sassafras), which is OK with me. Otherwise the flavor is rather mild and kind of thin, without much birch or licorice. Since I wasn’t so distracted by the multi-story taste this glass, I got a little more of a root-y aftertaste, too.

I’m actually a little disappointed with BJ’s root beer, but maybe my expectations are set a bit too high. After all, I do like the pizza at BJ’s for the most part, and they do make good lemonade and onion rings, not to mention the only beer I’ve ever not hated (yeah, not a fan of beer…)(and I’m referring to their stout, in case you’re wondering what beer I don’t hate). However, I’m not at all saying the root beer is bad – it’s just OK. I’ll have it next time I’m at BJ’s, but I’m not going to go to BJ’s just for the root beer. With that, I give BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse root beer a 3.

Field Trip!

This past weekend, I learned that “there’s a fine line between hobby and mental illness.” Now I’ll have to admit that I gleaned this sage statement from a souvenir sign in a gift shop in Temecula, possibly while crossing this referenced line… I say this because this past weekend’s excursion marks the farthest I have ever driven specifically to look for root beer. Granted, I was already in the Lake Elsinore area for a wedding, so I didn’t drive that far by comparison – 20 miles farther south than I would have already had to drive for the wedding, so only an additional 40 mile round trip, really. But hey, I live in Pasadena, so driving two and a half hours down to a part of the Southern California desert I’ve been avoiding (more specifically, a part of the I-15 freeway I’ve been avoiding) since I moved out to LA is no small occasion. And while I have acquired root beers in other cities and even in other states, those root beers had just been welcome highlights to trips I had to take anyways. My trip to Temecula, however, was with root beer in mind – thus my first chronicled Root Beer Field Trip!

You may recall that I’ve already written fondly about the Old Town Root Beer Company’s root beer, so you can imagine that I was quite excited to visit the Old Town Root Beer Company itself.

See, I was really there…

I’m not clear as to how long the company has been around, but I do know that owners John and Cory Montgomery make their house label root beers (three varieties so far) from a family recipe they found folded up in John’s grandmother’s family Bible. John and Cory – who are very nice, by the way – still run the shop, along with what appear to be younger generations of their family. Turns out John used to live in Pasadena, too, not too far away from where we live now!

The brew that started it all. With some friends.

According to the local visitor’s guide, John got his start in sodas through a Dr. Pepper bottling plant he owned with his family, later branching into various pursuits including a Coca-Cola bar in the Ukraine. Here’s just a smidgin’ of what has to be a couple hundred different sodas they sell in the store.

The two best things from Mansfield, OH: the Missus and Stewart’s – you probably already know which one I like better…

For vintage soda collectors, they've also got old soda bottles and mugs. I was tempted by the barrel-shaped Dad's mug on the far right...

Bottoms up.

They also sell root beer floats made with one of their signature root beers – poured straight out of the bottle, as opposed to a tap, as I first hoped. I’m not disappointed, though, since the root beer flavor was still quite good, even mixed with melty ice cream. Nice and refreshing on a hot day, so much so that it didn’t survive long enough to be photographed…

On the road again…

Faygo

The Pooj calls out, "He went that way." *

(BevMo Pasadena, April 2011)

While many a soda has probably been criticized for tasting like carbonated frosting (::cough::Jones::cough::), I think Faygo may be the first I’ve encountered that actually brags of this. Faygo was conceived as the Feigenson Brothers Bottle Works in 1907 by said Feigenson brothers, Detroit Russian-immigrant bakers who developed their soda flavors from cake frosting recipes. Said brothers later shortened their company name to Faygo in the 1920s because their original company name was too long to print on a glass bottle. Interesting historical note – the Faygo website states that sodas were referred to as “pop” because of the popping sound made when bottles were opened. Today, Faygo is available in all canning and bottling mediums (i.e., aluminum, plastic, glass), but the only ones I’ve encountered in Southern California are the “retro” style glass bottles that the company revived in 2007. Back in Michigan, Faygo-flavored cupcakes are also available, harkening back to the company’s frosting roots.

You’ll be glad to hear that Faygo Root Beer does not taste like cake frosting, but instead veers towards the wintergreen and clove end of the herb spectrum. There are also the requisite hints of licorice and vanilla, but the smell and aftertaste are still heavier on the birch and cloves. I would say the herbs also tend towards bark-y, since the aftertaste is almost slightly bitter, but it's just sweet enough to meld well with the heavy dose of herbs. One possible down-side: it seems somewhat acidic, evidenced by a squeaky feel it leaves on my teeth, and it is far from what I’d call smooth. Still, it has a good flavor, with a good scent throughout, similar to something you’d get from a tap (which is good, since they advertise it as draft style).

Faygo Root Beer recently won a taste test of regional root beers over at Serious Eats, but I’m not certain that I'm as impressed as they were. Perhaps my expectations were set a bit high, since I typically hold the Serious Eats team and their opinions in high regard. While I think Faygo is good, I’m not sure it would even break into my top five (maybe my top ten) – probably means I need to do another test later to see how it stacks up against my favorites. But hey, I’ve never claimed to be anything other than subjective. That in mind, Faygo Root Beer gets a very low 4.