Boxer Hard Root Beer
Minhas Craft Brewery

 

 

If you are looking for all the qualities you expect to find in a beer - you won't find them here. However, rating this beer as a Root Beer, it has it all: nice rich cola caramel colour with a frothy head, wonderful root (anise/fennel/licorice) scents, the cane sugar definitely helps mask this as a true brew. And there are hints of molasses and vanilla. As a Root Beer - it is actually very smooth and rich much like Dad's Old Fashioned - but not as sweet as A&W. And I didn't even notice the alcohol in it. It is fantastic as a Hot Summer Day drink - my biggest "issue" is that it tastes so much like Root Beer sipping for me was difficult - It was so tasty that I had three in a very short period of time - that's when I noticed that a paltry 5.5% is NOT something you should assume is not going to kick your butt.

This is basically just root beer with alcohol. As a beer, it simply is not. As a root beer, it is quite tasty with the added bonus of getting you tipsy.

330ml bottle - 'beer, natural and artificial flavours: contains barley' - heady, if at least qualifying initial information, for a brew that came to me via the auspices of a newbie Northern Alberta sales agent of this equally clueless brewing concern.

This beer pours a clear, dark red-tinted brown colour, with one measly finger of barely puffy, and mostly just fizzy, um, head, which leaves absolutely zilch in the way of lace around the glass as it hastily blows off.

It smells of somewhat reserved generic root beer (think of those store-brand grocery store, um, choices), weak caramel malt, further cheap vanilla notes, and very little else. The taste is sugary sweet caramel and toffee-tinted sugar (as opposed to the more complex malt side of things), sarsaparilla root mistakes, and a hint of dime-store black licorice.

The carbonation is quite soft in its not long for this life and soda-friendly fizziness, the body a solid medium weight for the broad style, and actually more or less smooth, with a weird, devil-spawned creaminess considering making itself known. It finishes sweet, with nothing less than that deflated (not that it's all that uncommon) fast food resto syrup-fed root beer experience leading the unchallenged charge.

Overall, this is one of the best-performing Minhas 'beers' that I have ever fucking tasted, in the sense that it is not a beer, really, but rather a rip-off of A&W, et al, with an admittedly well-obfuscated 11-proof booziness. Good on ya, ye who take advantage of the Berghoff name's heritage, and can rot in the hell that you probably have no 'faith' in, for all I give a flying spaghetti monster in the sky shit about.