If you read beer trade publications - or, more likely, beer blogs that write about beer sales figures - you might have been shocked to learn that, according to Chicago market research firm IRi, the most popular craft beer of 2015, at 1.95 million cases sold, wasn't from Samuel Adams or Sierra Nevada: It was Not Your Father's Root Beer, from Wisconsin's bucolic-sounding Small Town Brewery.
Why is that shocking? Because there is no way in the world that this alcoholic root beer resembles actual beer, let alone craft beer.
Okay, sure. Not Your Father's and its adult-soda doppelgangers are technically similar to beer, as they are fermented malt beverages. But so is Smirnoff Ice, and no one's comparing that stuff to Dogfish Head or Stone.
Hard root beer had its breakthrough last year, but let's be clear: This syrupy, chemical-flavored beverage is the new Mike's Hard Lemonade, the new Bacardi Breezer. It's a drink for people who want to get drunk but don't like the taste of beer, or cider, or wine - or alcohol in general. It is, when you get down to it, the new birthday cake vodka. One Washington beer bar manager, who reluctantly sells the stuff, told me that the people buying it are "the happy hour crowd . . . 21, 22 years old. It's approachable and really new for them."
The label of Not Your Father's Root Beer bills it as "ale with the taste of spices." That's like describing International Delight as gourmet coffee with the taste of Bailey's Irish Creme. No. What comes out of that bottle isn't ale, at least in the way anyone who drinks beer knows ale. When was the last time you bought a craft beer whose listed ingredients were "natural vanilla extract, other natural and artificial flavors and caramel color"?
Caramel color? What kind of honest-to-goodness ale can't be brewed with a different malt in order to change the color of the finished product?
When Pabst took over and expanded distribution of Not Your Father's last spring, the drink became a legitimate national sensation. Stores couldn't keep it in stock. Naturally, competition quickly entered the marketplace: Coney Island, an offshoot of the Boston Beer Co., released its Hard Root Beer a few months later. By December, AB-InBev, the parent company of Budweiser, had rolled out Best Damn Root Beer.
I wasn't surprised. But, upsettingly, even craft brewers have felt compelled to get in on the action: San Diego's award-winning Mission Brewing has its own Hard Root Beer, released last spring. Abita, which has long made a non-alcoholic root beer with Louisiana cane sugar, unveiled Bayou Bootlegger at the end of 2015. Saranac, makers of the non-alcoholic Saranac 1888 line of root beer, ginger beer and orange soda, released Jed's Hard Root Beer in October. (Saranac isn't exactly new to the game: If you were in college in the late 1990s or early 2000s, you were probably introduced to Jed's Hard Lemonade at some point. The brewery revived the name just for this line of alcopops.)
What's in that bottle of root beer might be gross, but I'm also appalled by the idea that this stuff is considered "craft" anything by people who should know better.
Even worse than the branding, though, is how the stuff tastes. In the interest of education, I bought bottles of Not Your Father's, Best Damn Root Beer, Coney Island, Mission and Bayou Bootlegger and held a tasting party at my house. If I'm lucky, my friends might forgive me and come to another one.
All five root beers were poured into plain plastic cups, and it didn't take long for the criticism to come pouring out. Best Damn Root Beer has "a lingering, medicinal, cough syrup aftertaste." Mission "coats your tongue unpleasantly" and finishes with a "bitter chemical artificial mint chewing gum" note.
"There's something that just doesn't seem right about" Bayou Bootlegger, I said.
"There's nothing that's good about it," my wife responded, comparing the "weird" mix of spices - anise, mint, vanilla - to a bad mulled wine.
There were grimaces with each sip. The only one that we didn't outright hate was Coney Island, which, if you close your eyes, tastes closest to real root beer. But no one asked for seconds, so I volunteered to open a large bottle of Green Flash's double stout, brewed with serrano peppers, to "kill the aftertaste with fire."
Not Your Father's murky origin story reminds me of those bourbon outfits that spun tales of their family's bootlegging adventures and pre-Prohibition distilling recipes while they were actually buying aged whiskey from a factory in Indiana. Reporters have dug into Small Town Brewery, based in Wauconda, Ill., and heard stories about a father and son home-brewing, and 17th-century recipes passed down from a great-great-grandfather who brewed beer on his ships while ferrying "some of the earliest settlers to America." (Alarm bells going off yet?) They've also heard plenty of skepticism about the brewery's methods.
Whatever its history, the company's current corporate ties are undeniable. Listed on its label application to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau in September 2014 is Drink Four Brewing, the company that owns Four Loko - remember the alcoholic energy drink? - and Mosketto. And the address listed is that of City Brewing, one of the largest contract breweries in the country, with a capacity of 7 million barrels a year and a client history that includes Smirnoff Ice, Mike's Hard Lemonade and other "malternatives," including Four Loko.
Pabst Brewing Co., which signed up as the distributor of Not Your Father's Root Beer in early 2015, acquired a stake in the company last summer and now owns the production rights. For that reason, the Brewers Association doesn't consider Not Your Father's to be craft beer and lumps Small Town under the Pabst umbrella with legacy brands such as National Bohemian, Schlitz and PBR. (Full disclosure: I've consumed my share of those beers.)
Some bar professionals I've spoken to about hard root beer say the trend is at, or close to, its peak. I wish I shared their optimism. In March, Not Your Father's Root Beer got government approval for mass-producing a draft version that is 10.7-percent alcohol by volume - almost twice as strong as the current stuff. And the competition keeps coming: Already this year, Seagram's released a hard root beer, as did Wisconsin's smaller Rhineland Brewing Co. That one's called Over the Barrel.
It's abundantly clear that I'm not the target audience for hard root beer. But I'm worried that might change. For the spring cocktail list at Jack Rose, head bartender Trevor Frye says he is planning to "really dive down into the beer-and-a-shot combo." Instead of the usual bourbon-and-imperial stout pairings, Frye's choices are more along the lines of a smoky mezcal with a radler, the German mashup of wheat beer and grapefruit soda. "It's like a Paloma [cocktail], you know?" he says.
But one of the most unexpected choices on this new menu pairs green Chartreuse, a centuries-old herbal liqueur, with Coney Island Hard Root Beer, which Jack Rose beer director Nahem Simon agrees is the best of the hard root beers. The combination goes back to the Rickhouse in San Francisco, where it was a popular post-shift drink. "I love Chartreuse, but I hate root beer," Frye says.
The bitter, vegetal Chartreuse and the sweet, fizzy root beer are an odd couple - and just like in a stereotypical romantic comedy, they bring out the best in each other.
Frye encourages alternate sips from the glass and bottle: Chartreuse's burn is countered by the root beer's vanilla notes, and the spices from the liqueur offer a firm base that meshes with and even enhances Coney Island's sarsaparilla undertones. Something just pops. All of a sudden, I'm not associating hard root beer with the cringe-inducing cough-syrup notes in Best Damn Root Beer or the unpleasantly bitter, artificial mint in the finish of Mission Root Beer. I'm wondering what else this stuff could be paired with.
And now I'm scared they've won.
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