The Best Root Beer Brand Is Perfectly Sweet And Spicy

Sure, it's kind of an oldhead soda. In these days of Dr. Pepper and Mountain Dew, drinking something like root beer is oddly old-fashioned — only a step or two removed from those celery sodas Dr. Brown's sells. But not only does drinking root beer put you in touch with an older America — one with drugstores and apothecaries and a little bit of Old World dust — it just straight-up tastes good. Don't believe us? Try our favorite brand of root beer, which we determined after an extensive blind taste test: Stewart's. The pop comes in those glass bottle beauties you'll find in pizzeria refrigerators here and there but might not have had cause to pick up until now. (Don't worry, teetotallers — root beer doesn't contain alcohol and never really has.)

Stewart's, as you might guess from the glass bottles, is a consciously old-fashioned brand — but just because it's old-fashioned doesn't mean it's not good. (And it's not so old-fashioned that it contains sassafras root, which was an ingredient in the original root beers but was phased out.) We raved about it in our taste test: "It starts with the aroma, where you get that expected sweet and spicy scent, which is amplified when you take a sip." Flavored with, among other things, cane sugar, quillaia extract, and yucca extract, the resulting taste is pleasantly earthy, just sweet enough, very well balanced, and perfectly carbonated. Not every place carries this root beer, but if you happen to find some in a deli or pizzeria, don't hesitate to grab a bottle.

If you're really interested in trying some, see if there are any Stewart's restaurants near you. That's right — much like root beer rival A&W, Stewart's has its own chain of restaurants, which serve classic American fast food like hamburgers, hot dogs, and cheesesteaks in a drive-in setting. There aren't very many of them nowadays (most of them can be found in New Jersey and Ohio), but it's a delight to see a little slice of the 1950s in real life, isn't it?

The restaurants actually came before the root beer, or at least the root beer bottles you'll find in stores. Stewart's started life in 1924 as a drive-in refreshment stand operated by one Frank Stewart, a teacher in Mansfield, Ohio, who wanted to make some extra money over the summer. Originally he only sold root beer and popcorn (in a canny business move, he made sure the popcorn was liberally salted to encourage root beer sales). As his root beer, which he formulated with chemists to get just right, soared in popularity, the business model expanded. Today, Stewart's root beer is rightfully acclaimed, although it's now owned by Cadbury, which purchased it in 2000 along with Snapple for over $1 billion.