Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Sometimes Tipsy? Hard Ginger Ale Review

 Not Your Father's Ginger Ale - WineWorks
Last week was insanely busy, and this week is shaping up to be more of the same, so I've been doing a lot of things I wouldn't normally do in order to survive. I'm drinking coffee to keep me going during the day and now I'm having a boozy beverage as the sun goes down? Who am I? What is happening to my life?
This has actually been in my fridge for quite a while and I figured it might be a good way for me to wind down tonight before going back to the grind tomorrow, so let's see if this boozy soda is worth the extra calories!
I really like the fun retro-styling that the Not Your Father's brand has going for it. It's classy, but playful. We've got faux texturing on the label and a limited color palette, making it look aged, but the layout and typefaces are quite modern. It's a fun anachronistic package and I don't know about the rest of the country, but over here in Jersey it has been flying off the shelves! When their first hard soda flavor debuted, the Not Your Father's Root Beer, stores were limiting 1 6-pack per customer! It was insane! The hype seems to have died down a bit, thanks to production being amp'd up, and now several flavors of Not Your Father's are available at our local liquor store. I tried the root beer at my cousin's birthday last year, and it was pretty good, but I wanted something a little different, so about 4 months ago I picked up a bottle of the ginger ale to review...but never got around to it. Well, better late than never! Time to pop this thing open. 

I was really hoping this would be a spicy ginger ale, similar to Fentiman's or Virgils, but it's not. This stuff is really sweet and mildly ginger-y. It's more on-par with ginger ales you would buy in the supermarket, like Seagram's, which makes sense. This is going for more of a hard soda vibe than a spicy ginger beer. As far as drink-ability goes, this is a little (dare I say) too sweet! And that's coming from a girl who likes crazy, sugary, barely-booze-y beverages. My current cocktail of choice is lemon-lime soda, sour watermelon vodka and Sour Patch kids! The bottle says that the comapny seeing this as "ale brewed with ginger" and that seems fairly accurate, if you add a TON of sugar in there as well. The carbonation helps. but I added some lemon juice for some added zing and that helped me polish off the bottle. 
Now, flavoring was pretty "meh" for me, but this stuff did pack a soothing punch! It's 5.9% alcohol by volume and I really started to feel it after drinking only half a bottle. As we all know, I'm a light weight, and this had me feeling pretty mellowed out. It didn't get me drunk, or buzzed, but it gave me that calm heavy feeling in my limbs that I needed after running around like a chicken with it's head cut off all day. (That's a gruesome idiom when you really think about it.) 
Would I buy this again? Probably not. As I said, it was too sweet to be sip-able on it's own. I'd rather reach for a refreshingly spicy ginger beer, but if this was at a party I'd give it another shot. Maybe that's a sign my taste buds are finally growing up.
© Maria Smith http://poison-and-antidote.net
Like me on facebook to keep up with all my adventures!

No comments:

Post a Comment