Hoover Dam Root Beer

 Well... we finally did it kids. We cleaned out the years-long backlog in my fridge. This may seem like it's down to the wire getting this done before the end of the year, but truth be told i could have finished this months ago. I've just been lazy. To recap, i declared that i would clean out my backlog of root beers in my fridge by the end of this year. I documented this in the Joby Joe's review in January. And this is the final one that has been taunting me every time i open the fridge doors. I picked this up at our local Rocket Fizz as it is one of the novelty root beers distributed and offered there. The Hoover Dam is an incredible feat of engineering that lies on the border between Nevada and Arizona. I've driven over and by it many times in my life and have even toured the areas they allow you to tour. The hydro-electric turbines turned by water flowing through the dam supply electricity to both Las Vegas and Phoenix as well as countless other small towns and areas both nearby and far away. 

But the main thing i think of when i think of the Hoover Dam is the game Fallout: New Vegas, which i played through at least 3 if not 4 times to get all the different endings. There is quite the epic showdown at the end of that game which takes place at the Hoover Dam. Sorry for the lightest of spoilers any of you that have this 13-year-old game on your list of "things to eventually complete". Kind of like a fridge full of root beers to review and post about on the internet that is received by essentially no one, or maybe that noose you started tying and swear will someday be the way you take your own life. At least one of those things is true for me. At least one. What a great open-world game this was though, set in a dystopian post-nuclear war future that's gritty and violent but still fun enough to come back to multiple times to see everything they packed into it. 

 

The form of currency in these games is bottle caps and the flagship soda is called Nuka-Cola, but in New Vegas they introduced another soda, a root beer variant called Sunset Sarsaparilla. This has nothing to do with anything other than i am mentioning it on this root beer review blog, so while the tie-in may be tenuous at best it is at least not meritless. Also there are lots of guns and copious amounts of violent combat pervasive in the game. And the Hoover Dam is central to all of it. So that's what i think of when i think of the Hoover Dam. Not the hundreds of actual men who died making it, but the hundreds of video game men i murdered while standing on it. Also, i've heard some of the actual men who died making it did so by falling into the wet cement while they were pouring it and are still encased and entombed within the dam walls. How cool is that? I mean, not cool that they died, but these guys are now legends, so much so that i don't know any of their names off the top of my head and i just make a passing comment about them and consider that as paying my respects. So to all those men who's bodies are permanently a part of the Hoover Dam in a physical and literal sense, just think... you're still remembered by me, but only after i first think about Fallout. 

This root beer was purchased in a traditional 12 oz brown glass bottle. I like the label very much. It uses an old-timey sepia toned photo of the Hoover Dam as a backdrop with some delightfully sparkly gold font in handsome cursive to simply say "Hoover Dam Root Beer" with the very obvious but still fun tagline "dam good soda". You can see it coming from a mile away, but it still makes you smile when you see it. Cracking open the cap (and pocketing this precious currency for during the end-times) i was immediately met with the rich aroma of wintergreen, which anyone who reads these reviews will know i am a fan of the wintergreen flavor profile in a root beer. So that was a nice treat. However, like most of the root beers churned out by Rocket Fizz, the novelty of this root beer doesn't carry it in the long run. It is essentially displayed right on the label with the "dam good soda" joke. I can only assume this joke was the entire reason for naming this Hoover Dam Root Beer. Kind of a work backwards from the ending type thing. The wintergreen flavor, while good, is STRONG. Honestly, a bit too strong for my liking, and i generally have a decent liking for that kind of thing. It just overpowers everything else in the flavor profile. It basically tastes like drinking an Altoid. There is very little room left for a root beer flavor once you get past the wintergreen. And to add to that, it just overall tastes fairly watered down and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It is sweetened with pure cane sugar but i can't seem to get any of that when i drink it. Just a very sharp and aggressive wintergreen taste. I would say this ultimately suffers from a classic case of "too much of a good thing". 

My official review is that Hoover Dam Root Beer gets 4 (four) IBCs. I don't hate this enough to trash it but it's simply not even good enough to be middle of the road. If the Hoover Dam historical monument and power station gets a rating of 8 and the game New Vegas is an easy 10, then this can't be anywhere above a 4. Because unlike both the game or the monument, i won't ever be revisiting this one. Better luck next time Rocket Fizz.