Cheers Boston Root Beer

Well well well, this is going to be a super special review indeed. Not because the 10th anniversary of me doing this dumb blog quietly came and went back in Oct of 2018, though that is special, but for another reason. You see my dear readers, this review right here that you happen to be reading with your very own eyes is nothing less than THE 200TH ROOT BEER i have drank and reviewed. Yes, this is an historic event the likes no one has ever seen. What's that? Other reviewers have drank and reviewed more than 200 kinds of root beer you say? Well then i would respond to that asinine comment with this simple question... do any of those reviewers or their reviews matter even a little bit? The answer of course is no. No they do not. So this is truly a special event. Wow. 200 root beers. And it only took me 10 years. I can assure you i will give this review my maximum effort. Ultimately that means that i will spend upward of 1 whole hour writing this thing, mere minutes of which is actual research of the root beer itself, and that not unlike The Avengers End Game, the whole concept will be overblown and stretch the limits of tolerable suspension of disbelief with the end result being fairly predictable/inevitable. And not unlike the final season of Game of Thrones, the pace of this review will doubtless include a slow beginning, confusing middle section, and unsatisfying end followed by a petition for me to rewrite the whole thing. Shall we do one more? Not unlike John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum, this review will probably include a lot of relentless violence, including someone being killed with a book. Alright, i think that's enough of that.
Now, on to talking about the root beer. I have several root beers in my fridge right now, most of which are likely mediocre or novelty drinks with no real thought behind them other than a catchy pun-based name or something of the like. Sorry root beers in my fridge, you know who you are. But for this, my 200th root beer review, i wanted to review something special. Something not regionally available here in Arizona, that i hadn't heard of before, and that isn't music based (i plan to do a whole run on music based root beers soon). So when it came to decide amongst the root beers in my fridge, this was an obvious choice. First off, i should say that this root beer is a nod to the hit TV show Cheers from the 1980's. I have never watched the entire series as i was but just a small lad during it's original airing. I just caught a few odd episodes here and there, but i am aware of the characters/actors and some of the tropes involved. It's a beloved TV show centered around an actual bar in Boston, though i'm told the TV set bar does not resemble the real life Cheers at all. The other reason this root beer is special is because i had no idea it existed until my lovely wife presented me with two bottles of it last Christmas. She went out of her way to order these from the Cheers fan website and gift shop, which from what i can ascertain is attached to the original Cheers bar on Beacon Hill in Boston. It appears there is another Cheers bar built to be a replica of the TV set at Faneuil Hall, also in Boston. I don't get any indication from the website about the brewing of the root beer and how long it's been available, but kudos to my wife for finding this one.

These bottles are the "stout" 12 oz. brown glass bottles that i like. I just enjoy the shape of them. A little different than the standard shape. The label is a color image of the iconic Cheers... logo? That's not the right word. It's the image during the opening credits and theme song of the outside of the bar. I'm sure there is a term for that, but i don't know it. Anyway, it's very recognizable to anyone even passively familiar with the show such as myself. It's very plain and very straight forward, but it's effective. I like it ultimately. Not much else to say about it.

I get the feeling this stuff is brewed on site there, though it may not be. I have no way to back that up, but the taste of this root beer reminds me of Surf City Root Beer which is self brewed at Brewbakers in California. It has that same kind of yeasty taste to it that underlies the VERY subtle root beer flavor. It's not super sweet, but it's good and well carbonated. I get a pretty bad aftertaste from it as well. I can't really pull a strong flavor profile out of this root beer though. I don't dislike it, but it's somewhat ambiguous as to what it actually tastes like. I've drank both bottles at this point and still don't have any real idea of what more i can say about this root beer.

My official review is that Cheers Boston Root Beer gets 5 (five) IBCs. I know i had a big long preamble about how this is a special root beer hand selected to by my anointed 200th review so it's a little disappointing that this one falls on a flat 5 like so many other boring, bland root beers. But i gotta be honest, and this one is just fine. I don't dislike it, but there's nothing about it that pops. So was this root beer review a failure? Well... yeah, probably. But not unlike Breaking Bad, we all knew from the very beginning how this thing had to end. We always knew Walter White was a dead man, just like we all knew that 200 reviews into this thing i would still be giving out middle of the road scores to just about every root beer that comes my way. So you're welcome for being predictable. And if we are lucky i will lend my expertise to many more subpar reviews in the years to come. Cheers!