As we've had three new sucralose-sweetened rootbeers appear on the market in the past month, a tasting was in order.
To my mind, there are three kinds of rootbeer "flavours":
1. Heavy vanilla, smooth--A&W has the best representation of this.
2. Spicy, with a bit of a bite--Barq's has this, and it was even better when it was local to New Orleans. Maybe when Coca Cola bought it, the move to corn syrup moderated the taste?
3. "Root beer barrel candy" taste--Dad's rootbeer is a good example of this. Heavy sassafrass flavour.
The three rootbeers we tried were:
1. Jones Sugar-free root beer. This is out of Vancouver, but I think the product in the states comes from Seattle. Bought this at Cosentino's, a local family-owned supermarket. $3.99 for a four-pack of 12 oz bottles
2. Boylans Bottleworks Diet Root Beer. This is an east-coast brand, which has rather spotty distribution out here on the west coast. I bought this at Oakville Grocery at Stanford Shopping Center. $1.29 for an 11.5oz bottle
3. Hansen's Creamy Head Diet root beer. Canned in Southern California. This is the latest I bought this at Trader Joe's in Sunnyvale. $1.89 for a six-pack.
All three were chilled in the garage mini-fridge for a day before tasting. Since flavour when chilled was important, the root beer wasn't removed from the refrigerator until we were ready to taste it.
We rated the root beer on a number of aspects, including:
1.Does it taste like "diet" anything? The root beer was rated down if there was a pronounced "diet" taste. Sugar vs corn syrup taste was preferred.
2. Creation of a "root beer head". Not only should a head form when the root beer is poured, the head should have a soft appearance and should not be ephemeral.
3. Root Beer "flavour". For the purpose of the tasting, any of the accepted root beer flavours were allowed. Off-flavours or overwhelming flavour were rated down.
Results:
1 )Jones Sugar Free Root Beer: The only area where this root beer was rated down was its total inability to form a good head. Even after pouring into the middle of a glass, the foam was small, indistinct, and disappeared within a few minutes.
The flavour was of the "root beer barrel candy" type, and fairly pronounced. However, it was not overwhelming, and left no aftertaste. This root beer had a very clean finish.
2) Boylans: This suffered in comparison with the Jones, as the flavour was not nearly as pronounced. In fact, it was difficult to discern what variant of root beer flavour it had. It had better foaming than Jones, and had a very nice "sugar-sweetened" taste to the root beer. It left a slighly sweet aftertaste. If someone is not a fan of the "root beer candy" flavour of root beer, this would be an acceptable choice.
3) Hansen's: The only two items we could think of that were positives for this root beer is that it's lots cheaper than the other two, and it had an impressive head. The flavour was something that approached root beer but wasn't root beer, a similar problem we've found in the past with Hansen's sugar-free ginger ale. Not recommended, unless you're looking for something cheap to mix in with other flavours.
Conclusions: If you're going to drink a good sucralose-sweetened root beer, you're going to pay for the privilege. However, prices are consistent with aspartame-sweetened small batch root beers, such as Stewart's. However, the root beer afficianado should be assured that what there is, a lot are highly drinkable.
Posted by lsefton at April 11, 2004 03:35 PM