Mad Jack Hard Root Beer
Molson Coors Canada

 

 

 

 

The curiosity finally got to me so I picked a couple of single cans today. Pours with a VERY quickly fading head atop clear reddish-brown liquid, bubbly soda-like carbonation. The smell is sugar sweet with a somewhat cheapish adjuncty Lager aroma and some light Wintergreen. Thin and pinprickly mouthfeel upon first sip, then sweet and familiar classic Root Beer flavor that fades quick leaving a sugary taste on the palate. Alcohol is barely noticable at all. Finshes like a regular Root Beer, it was ok but would I buy it again? Maybe. Too sweet and sugary to drink more than one or two at a sitting but on a warm May night it's more of a thirst-quencher.

 

 

 

355ml can - well, the hard root beer year of 2016 continues, with the big boys stumbling over themselves to get on the latest bandwagon. And what the hell is with the barrel imagery on the label?

This beer pours a clear, medium orange-brick amber colour, with three fingers of puffy, loosely foamy, and certainly bubbly tan head, which leaves absolutely nothing in the way of lace anywhere near the glass as it quickly fizzes away.

It smells of musty, artificial vanilla-heavy root beer (of the Barq's type), a metallic stoniness, and a further kludgy caramel sweetness. The taste is mixed vanilla and caramel sweeteners, an earthy root thing (sassafras, I suppose), some muddled sugary spice (clove and cinnamon, maybe), some free range herbal notes, and a slight sense of alcohol warming that gives you the idea that you're not consuming a kiddie beverage here.

The carbonation is quite tame and barely frothy after the opening theatrics, the body a decent sugar-buoyed middleweight, and generally smooth, with just a touch of edgy generic spice taking a wee toll here. It finishes well off-dry, but less and less like straight-up grocery-store brand root beer than at first take.

Well, leave it to Molson to try and ape the common soft drink in making an adult version of it, and kind of sort of fail. The big vanilla, caramel, and spicy root is more or less there, but fades quickly, leaving a mess of musty, almost dirty essences come last call. There are better options out there for this type of thing right now, if you want to indulge your inner child, that is.

Mad Jack Hard Root Beer from Molson Coors

Look: Brown body. No head, lots of carbonation,

Smell: Vanilla, sweet caramel, the carbonation was splashing while I smelled the beer. The smell is really plaisant.

Taste: Like a root beer, Very sweet caramel on it. cinnamon, cloves, wintergreen, anise and somr vanilla bean

Feels: Once again like a root beer, I mean there is not really a difference, you barely feels the alcohol, the root beer taster and feels is always present.

Overall would I recommend it ? No, it is not a bad beer. I love root beer but the combination for me does not work. It is way too sweet and I really had hard time to finish and even I did not finished my glasses, so I give it a lower grade

473 mL can from TBS; dated Mar 17 2016 and served well-chilled.

Pours a clear, deep-hued copper brown with ruddy ruby-red highlights. A small cap of fizzy, off-white head is produced initially, but it fizzles itself out of existence before I've even managed to place the can back down on the table. The surface is completely bare afterwards; superficially it looks like root beer, save for the fact that there is very little effervescence. Smells like root beer - syrupy sweet caramel, with that underlying "artificial sassafras" herbal note that the big root beer brands all share. In a side-by-side sniff test, I don't think I'd be able to tell the difference between this and a glass of A&W.

The taste effectively manages to keep up the charade, never actually revealing that you are not, in fact, consuming a soft drink. More syrupy caramel sweetness and root beer herbal flavour that lasts throughout the profile. If you're specifically looking for it, you can just barely detect the alcohol at the back end. The mouthfeel is similar to that of the soft drink - a little slick and syrupy thanks to the abundance of sugar/flavouring, with prickly carbonation levels that soften out over time.

Final Grade: 3.29, a C+. Mad Jack Hard Root Beer turned out about as well as one might hope - at least, for a gimmicky Molson product. If you poured this into an old A&W restaurant beverage cup and placed it in your car's cup holder, I think it would require a particularly diligent OPP officer to determine that you are not actually drinking regular root beer... not that I plan to test this theory out myself any time soon. I prefer this over the apple lager, but in the end it's still less of a 'beer' than it is a malt beverage. If you're not above drinking the occasional "malternative" and also enjoy the taste of root beer, this may very well be worth a look.