Fiesta Root Beer

In 1932, Eddie Basha had one goal in mind: create a grocery store with the cheapest food products available. Now, 77 years later, Basha's is proud to bring you Fiesta Root Beer. Fiesta makes several flavors that are sold at Basha's grocery stores across the Valley of the Sun (i couldn't find any links with any sort of mention of this soda line). It's distributed by a company here in Chandler, AZ. Other than that, i really don't have much to go on with this soda. The only other thing i can really say is that this stuff is really cheap. I picked this 2-liter bottle for 69 cents. Fiesta, of course, is Spanish for "party". I get the feeling this thing is supposed to be packed with fun; really really inexpensive fun.

The label on this 2-liter bottle is brown with white text and there are little party streamers and bits of confetti flying all over the place on the label. Super simple, fairly boring, extremely generic looking. From the looks of the label, you'd think i picked it up at Food City and not Basha's. "Root Beer" is also written in Spanish on the bottle. It reminds me of when i lived in Canada. Everything in the supermarket is written in English and French. And i have the same feelings about this packaging decision as i did about the Canadians way of doing it: annoying. But, whatever... you can't please everyone.

All i can really say about this root beer is that it lives up to it's name, or at least the Mexican part of it. It's rather "spicy". The only thing that would make the experience really hit home is if you got to drink it out of a pinata (my choice? a donkey). A colleague of mine says that the wintergreen really sticks out to him. I can't seem to taste wintergreen at all though. It kinda has the nutmeggy taste of Dad's, but it's not nearly as sweet and it's a lot more sharp. I can still taste the decent root beer undertone, but that's not the prevalent flavor. It's not unpleasant, but definitely hard to pinpoint exactly what it tastes like. I can't really say it's something i'd make a trip back to Basha's for though.

My official review is that Fiesta gets 5 (five) IBCs. It's not bad and it's a touch different from the ordinary, but there's a reason this stuff is so cheap. It's cuz it's just really thrown together without much thought or care. I have often wondered if there was a Mexican root beer. Maybe this is about as close as it gets. And with a name like that, they should promote it with the slogan "a party in every bottle!" Yeah, that's good. Maybe i should pitch that to them.

I wonder how you say that in Spanish...