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UPDATE: December 15, 2015 at 11:37 a.m.
It seems the spiked soda trend continues to rage on well beyond summer, the quintessential sweet-and-bubbly drinking season. Anheuser-Busch, the makers of big brand beers like Budweiser, just launched their own version of the every popular boozy root beer, calling it Best Damn Root Beer.
While the company is definitely not first on the hard-soda scene (despite that slightly misleading tweet), its iteration has garnered a lot of hype online and in the media—most likely due to its reputation as the purveyor of substandard, albeit well known, suds. To be fair, the trend can now ride the wings of a megawatt brand and stick around for at least a few years and not just a few seasons.
ORIGINAL POST: August 3, 2015 at 11:49 a.m.
We've seen beer brewed with lobster and suds made entirely from cocoa beans, but the next big boom in bottled booze is is alcoholic root beer. In just a few months, the childhood classic has been given a major makeover—from soft drink to hard soda—and it's completely taking over this summer.
One brand in particular, Not Your Father's Root Beer, is highly sought after. And surprisingly, it's being cranked out by the kings of cheap beer: Pabst. Though the first batch of Not Your Father's was created back in 2013—when the brew masters at Small Town Brewery combined sassafras bark, vanilla, anise, wintergreen, and a couple other spices in a vat—the big-brand beer company only just purchased the stuff earlier this year. And its nationwide push is working.
Not Your Father's is so well loved that it has received glowing reviews on sites like Beer Advocate, where it was rated at 94 out of 100. And, if New York is any indication of the spiked root beer business, the hard soda will be selling out at liquor stores across the country in no time. (We went through four beer shops before one had Not Your Father's in stock.)
So how does it stack up to our favorite childhood pop? The minute we popped the cap, we were reminded of the root beer we grew up with. And the taste is exactly the same, with the alcohol totally masked. We couldn't believe this was really spiked. So we did what anyone should do with a few extra bottles: turned them into ice-cream floats. And damn, were they delish.
While Pabst's hard root beer is flying off of shelves, it's still a relatively new concept. And only a few breweries are currently carrying their own versions: Berghoff Brewery in Chicago announced the debut of its Rowdy Root Beer in June, and Coney Island Brewing (backed by Samuel Adams maker Boston Beer Company) is reportedly working on its own riff as well.
But like any other suds trend, we expect to see this root beer bubble grow exponentially as small craft companies jump on the bandwagon and start brewing their own spiked sodas.
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