Red Arrow Root Beer

A few months back i made a couple large online orders for root beers from a couple different sites, so the next several root beers that i will review will be from one of these sites i used. Red Arrow Root Beer was found on the site Soda Emporium, which has turned out to be quite useful as they cycle through new things all the time. They usually have the option to order individual bottles of a root beer, but sometimes they are only available in 4 or 6 packs. Shipping is always the killer with acquiring sodas this way, so it's only viable for me to order as many as i can/need at a time rather than one by one as they become available. But like i said, this is a good site for getting new root beers. Red Arrow is distributed by a company called Orca Beverages operated out of northern Washington state. They distribute a lot of older/classic sodas that aren't in regular circulation right now. I didn't spend to much time on it, but it's kind of a neat site.

The bottle is a tall 12 oz. dark brown glass bottle and the label is very simple and straight forward. I don't want to say lack luster because it really contains everything it needs and still caught my eye with the basic design of it. Sometimes simple is good. I like it.

I gotta say though, i wasn't as impressed with the taste. It had a nice hint of wintergreen aroma as i first twisted off the cap, but the taste left me wanting. It was very watery, sweet tasting from the cane sugar, but other than that i couldn't decipher much of a root beer flavor from it. I got a bit of anise flavor from it and it has somewhat of a sharp, almost spicy aftertaste (not uncommon to many root beers). It got better the more i drank it, but still was overall a bit of a let down. All the flavors were quite subtle and when all was said and done i had basically forgotten it.

My official review is that Red Arrow gets 4 (four) IBCs. I was leaning hard towards a 3 at first, but talked myself into a 4 after drinking it for a while. I realize that the reviews most people are interested in reading are the root beers which are very highly or very lowly rated. I want to deliver on those types of reviews, but the truth of the matter that the majority of root beers out there are just middle of the road. This happens to be another one of them, although i would consider it slightly less than middle of the road. Not the worst thing out there, but not my style. Go ahead and skip it.