Pop Singles Crystals Clear Root Beer

This one comes from a trade with that great collector and proprietor of The Museum of Root Beer, Vince. Pop Singles is an interesting brand that has a record on the label of their bottles, you know like it’s an old pop single. It makes googling the company rather difficult because there seems to be an actual single that was released about every flavor they carry (maybe that’s the idea?) and I couldn’t actually find a website. Maybe they don’t have one. I’m always very cautious about a clear root beer. A lot of real root beer ingredients are naturally a darker color, so if your root beer is crystal clear there’s some serious chemistry involved for flavor extraction and the sugar definitely wasn’t caramelized. In short, such brews seem highly unlikely to have a robust flavor profile. They do look cool and different though, so full points for novelty.

The Body is sweet with a mild, generic root beer flavor. It’s refreshing and a little acidic and there’s a slight hint of wintergreen and vanilla. The Bite is mild as well. There is a little spice and decent carbonation. The Head is medium and fizzes down quickly. The Aftertaste is mild and soda-ish.

This really isn’t particularly good. It’s almost like my experience with previous clear root beers and my reasons as to why they failed may actually be universally applicable. It may be impossible to make a colorless root beer be quality. We’ll never know until I find one. Till then, see how it rates against other root beers.