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- Manufacturer:
- Old Dominion Brewing Company, Ashburn, Virginia
- The Pitch:
- made with honey from VIRGINIA
Bottom of box:
OLD DOMINION BREWING COMPANY
- The Brewpub and Brewery
- 44633 Guilford Dr
- Ashburn, VA 20147
- (703) 724-9100
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VISIT OUR BREWPUB
- The Brewpub is open for lunch and dinner seven days a week. Our
menu features good burgers, fries, salads, sandwiches, chili, and
desserts. Glasses, shirts, hats, posters etc. are available at the
pub. All of the beers and root beer are available on draft at the
pub. Kegs, bottles and growlers (1/2 gallon glass jugs) gilled with
fresh draft beer can be purchased at the put to take home.
TOUR OUR BREWERY
- Brewery tours are available at 12:00 noon, 2:00 pm & 4:00
pm on Saturday and at 2:00 pm on Sunday.
- The Ingredients:
- Carbonated water, sugar, honey, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup,
natural and artificial flavor extracts, yucca, sodium benozate - a preservative
- and citric acid. Contains no caffeine.
- The box: not yet...
-
Spike says:- So this review didn't get off to a great start.
I couldn't unscrew the darn cap, so I use my t-shirt to protect my hand.
Still no luck. Now, I'm quite muscular, if I do say so myself, so I
look at the cap just to make sure it's a screw top. There's the arrow,
so I try again and...success! Unfortunately I soak my shirt with root
beer in the process. I'm actually smarter than that story may indicate.
Nevertheless, I won't let that incident color my review...
- The first thing about Dominion is it smells just like urine. And when
I poured it in the mug, chunks splashed out of the bottle into
the glass! Mouse heads! Was I the recipient of some root beer Mafia
message? Then, a shot rang out...there was a knock on the door...it
was a dark and stormy night...
- Ok, now for the real review before the Dominion lawyers reach for
fresh legal pads. This root beer actually looks like a root beer should:
dark with a nice natural-looking head. Fairly smooth, not too carbonated.
Definitely a different character to the sweetness - the "honey
from Virginia" really flavors the "water from our garden hose".
A little sweeter than I like, in fact...my lips felt sticky, and that's
not because I bathed in the stuff trying to get it open. Could it be
because the ingredients include sugar, honey, and corn syrup?
Oh wait, I almost forgot...they threw in high fructose corn syrup too.
"What the hell, if 1 is good, 4 must be great!" A little caffeine
and they could call this the "Jolt" of root beers. Mildly
flavored, not too spicy. Really not a bad root beer, there's just nothing
to get excited about (well, except the sugar high you'll get after just
1 bottle). It's a welcome break from most canned sodas, but still...too
sweet. I hate to do this, because I get enough hate mail over my IBC
rating and I've been getting e-mail saying "review Dominion"
forever, but Dominion gets a C+.
Not to go on about the sugar thing, but to be fair I compared the
sugar content of Dominion with a few unreviewed brews lingering in
my refrigerator. Dominion weighs in with 42g of sugar. The others
had 28g, 42g, and 44g. So Dominion is in the ballpark. But it still
tastes sweet!
- Update:
- Whilst reviewing Hard Times Cafe Root Beer (review)
I drank a bottle of this stuff at the same time to determine if they
are in fact the same root beers. They're not, but that's not why I'm
writing this. I think in my original review I got hung on up the sugar
thing. It is sweet, but after comparing it with Hard Times, I've decided
the sweetness is a good thing. This root beer, I failed to mention,
has a strange taste about it at first. I won't use the word "industrial"
- I try to reserve that word exclusively for Journey products. There
is a taste, an edge, that's not quite pleasing. It's not nasty, but
it's not enhancing my experience. Maybe it's the yucca. (Get it? yuck-a?
I crack myself up). Jokes aside, there is a funny taste there...
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