Bennetts Big Bear Root Beer

Today we announced that the winning name for our "name our mascot" contest was "Sir Durstig." The fine folks over at The Rootbeer Brothers came up with the name and we salute them for it. Their response was for us to grab our finest root beer and drink it in celebration. I tried, but what I grabbed certainly wasn't my best root beer, but it was the only one that I had that was already cold.

When I took my first sip I was nicely surprised at how dark and full-bodied it tasted. I was even more shocked when I looked at the ingredients and saw that it was sweetened with HFCS. Then I noticed that it has molasses in it and I understood and smiled. I want molasses in more root beers. The more I drank the less impressed I was. The molasses flavored remained with every sip, but the complexity of the root beer quality of it faltered. It seemed to get weaker and weaker with every sip, until I only had about a fifth of the bottle left. At that point it got stronger, but still not to the level that I wanted it to be.

This had the potential to be one incredible root beer, but when root beer extract is one of the ingredients I guess I shouldn't have expected much. This certainly wouldn't satisfy a tiny bear cub, let alone a full grown big bear.