Root Beer Review #19 – Thunder Beast

Thunder Beast is a root beer obsession. We are committed to crafting the greatest and most creative root beers this world has ever known. Are you ready to drink thunder?

This beverage and the matching commemorative cup was sent to us by our dear friends Jim & Sandi who hail from the great state of Rhode Island, but this particular brew hails from the District of Columbia. It is a fire-roasted brew, similar to our #1 contender, Sprecher, while also containing quillaja, which the last place GUS also used. So which will it be?

In case you’ve been living under a rock, there’s a current infatuation with pumpkin everything. Pumpkin lattes, donuts, jack-o-lanterns, seeds, pie, cookies, and lots of other treats. Logan taught me that pumpkin spice foods don’t necessarily mean they taste like pumpkin – it’s actually the nutmeg & cinnamon. Much like the crab dip flavored potato chips don’t taste like crabs. Thankfully, this root beer didn’t taste like pumpkin or crab dip.

Plus, it’s not even of the sarsaparilla family, licorice, or wintergreen. It’s got overtones of maple without a doubt. The website says there’s also butterscotch, but I didn’t taste it. Find some maple syrup, lower the viscosity by an order of magnitude or two, add some bubbliness and you have Thunder Beast. I’d have a hard time distinguishing this from maple cream soda – but that’s not a bad thing. On a colder day with one of those Trader Joes maple cookies, we’ve got a good pairing. Actually, I now want to try a warm version of this soda. A hot toddy replacement anyone?

I had to put this root beer right next to the butterscotch tasting root beer.

Derek’s Rating: 7.3

Here are the rankings so far:

9.5 Sprecher Root Beer
9.1 River City Root Beer
9.0 Americana Root Beer
8.8 Tower Root Beer
8.5 Henry Weinhard’s Root Beer
8.1 maine root handcrafted rootbeer
8.0 Virgil’s Root Beer
7.7 Chicago Root Beer
7.4 Bulldog Root Beer
7.3 Thunder Beast
7.2 O-So Butterscotch Root Beer
6.8 J.J. Stewart Root Beer
5.9 Red Arrow Root Beer
5.1 Saranac Root Beer
4.3 Triple “AAA” Root Beer
3.6 towne club root beer
3.4 Dad’s Old Fashioned Root Beer
2.5 Mug Old Fashioned Root Beer
0.1 GuS Dry Root Beer