Sprecher maple root beer

Background information: (from the website) "Sprecher Brewing Co. has a long history as the oldest Craft Brewery in Milwaukee, and our story is one of devotion to craft, commitment to the community, and a drive to share our fire-brewed sodas and beers with customers nationwide. We grew from an idea in the mind of Randy Sprecher to a Milwaukee craft brewing institution proudly owned by a small group of local investors. This is our story.

Before Randy Sprecher, there were no craft breweries in Milwaukee—only Miller, Pabst, and Schlitz. Randy himself was not in Milwaukee until 1980. Randy grew up on the west coast. He was drafted into the army during the Vietnam war, but due to colorblindness he was sent to work for a general in Augsburg, Germany instead of going to Vietnam.

Randy fell in love with German beers, and he was not able to find anything that compared when he moved back to the U.S. So, he began making his own German beers at home. Homebrewing quickly turned into an obsession for Randy. He was taking classes in Oceanography at Humboldt State when he returned from the service, but he switched to courses that helped him become a better brewer.

In 1972, Randy applied to study fermentation science at UC-Davis and refined his brewing skills to the point of expertise. Then, he perplexed the State of California by applying to establish a licensed brewery—a concept that the state did not understand. Down but not out, Randy secured a post as Supervisor of Brewing Operations at Pabst’s Milwaukee brewery. He packed up everything he owned into a VW Van and moved to Milwaukee.

While he worked at Pabst from 1980 to 1984, Randy held onto his dream of opening his own brewery. He continued homebrewing and saving money. When he lost his job in a big round of layoffs in 1984, Randy took the opportunity to begin building Sprecher Brewing Co. In 1985 Randy opened our first location at 701 W. Oregon St. in Walker’s Point. He hand-built much of the brewery equipment with friends, including the original gas-fired brew kettle. Milwaukeeans have always appreciated a good beer, and Randy’s flagship award-winning beers—the Black Bavarian and Special Amber, quickly became popular.

However, in 1993, a canal retainer wall fell into the Menominee river, and the brewery’s parking lot went down with it. It became difficult to access the brewery after that, so Sprecher began relocating to a renovated elevator cab factory in Glendale, a process that finished in 1995.

Today Sprecher is one of the only breweries in the U.S. that still uses a unique fire-brewing process that caramelizes the flavors to give Sprecher’s craft sodas and beers big bold flavor. The popularity of Sprecher’s unique craft beverages has led to continued expansion of the Glendale, Wisconsin facilities. Sprecher has gone from serving the Milwaukee and Wisconsin area to being distributed to retailers in over twenty states. In February of 2020, Randy Sprecher retired having achieved his dreams. He wanted the company to stay in competent local hands, so he sold it to a small team of Milwaukee investors."

Product details: 12 fl. oz.  Sprecher Brewing Co., Glendale, WI 53209. 200 calories, 44g sugar. Glass bottle with twist off top. www.sprecherbrewery.com

Ingredients: Carbonated water, cane sugar, natural flavors, maple syrup, natural caramel color, citric acid.


My thoughts: Fall is in the air. The temperatures are dropping. Flowers are withering away. The maple leaves on the trees are changing color...errr, wait. I'm in Los Angeles, so the only leaves I see are palm tree leaves and they are decidedly green. But you get the picture. This root beer bring so mind the fall season, with it's subdued yellow, brown and red label and maple leaf theme, so it's an appropriate that I give it a try at this time of the year. The last time I had Sprecher (their regularly flavored version), it was barely better than average. This time, I'm hoping it'll be a flavor I'm more thankful for. So let's get on with it!

It does have a good, rooty sassafras flavor to it, though knowing it's flavored with maple syrup leaves me searching for the hints of that aspect. Part of what makes this difficult is the strong wintergreen flavor. It's not extremely overpowering, but does overwhelm the other flavors that may be more subtle, including the maple, though I do detect slight hints of vanilla. As I let the initial flavor fade away, the mintiness stays behind, but wait long enough and a vague maple flavor eventually works its way to the surface, though if I didn't know this was "maple" root beer I might not notice it at all as the flavor takes long enough to get noticed that I would probably have stopped paying attention at that point and missed it completely.

The carbonation is a major disappointment, as it's fairly weak and quickly dissipates. I prefer vigorous carbonation where it almost hurts my tongue, and this one is a below average score. Perhaps partly helped by the lower amounts of carbonation, this unsurprisingly is a fairly smooth root beer, but falls short of the creaminess offered by some of the competition. As for sweetness, the combination of cane sugar and maple syrup works out fine, as I was a bit worried it would come off too syrupy, as there is literally syrup in the bottle. But they struck a good balance and it's only slightly more sugary feeling than usual.

So, when it comes to this season, this one doesn't fall flat on it's face though it does fall flat on carbonation. It's a decent effort, slightly surpassing their regular root beer offering, but a little more minty than I would prefer. I'd be curious to see if, in a blind taste test, anybody would detect the maple aspect of this? Perhaps I should do a taste test comparison with some of my root beer friends.

Rating: B-
flavor: B-
aftertaste: B
sweetness: B-
smoothness: C+
carbonation: D