My first experience with this brand, and after viewing Hank’s website I come to find out that root beer was created in Philadelphia. Is that true? Wikipedia sure thinks so. Take a look.

This root beer is in the smooth family of root beer with a dominant vanilla/cream flavor. While the label touts the ingredients as gourmet, I doubt that the vanilla is anything special. I’m basing that on the fact that the taste of this root beer does not carry on your tongue for very long. You get a very small bite of the root base (probably an extract), you get the smooth vanilla push, and then it vanishes.

I didn’t dislike the root beer, but it didn’t stand out from the many other mass-produced root beers on the shelf. It’s about as good as A&W…which I like, but it doesn’t deserve an elevated rating. That’s my reasoning behind the 6 out of 10 rating. When you pay a premium price, and when something is marketed as “gourmet” it should be held to a high standard.

While I wouldn’t seek this root beer out over others, it wasn’t bad.

Catalog:
Purchased at Rocket Fizz on Capitol Hill, Seattle WA. Sampled on 7/17/2016