Sparky's Fresh Draft Root Beer

Recently I received an e-mail letter from Kevin Knox of Knox Brewing, the creator of Sparky's Fresh Draft Root Beer, with an offer to send us a bottle to enter in our taste test. I suppose he may have been attempting to sway our judges' opinions with a free bottle, but we welcomed the new flavor addition to the root beer cabinet. Sparky's is not available in stores in the Midwest, only in a small area around Monterey, California (see Sparky's website), so we were fortunate to get our hands on the sample. Knox Brewing seems to be a small-scale, family run affair. Kevin explained that the recipe started out in his own kitchen:

We made our root beer at home for many years before deciding to go ahead
and try to make and sell it commercially. Once we decided to make and sell it,
we couldn't make it at home anymore. We went out and rented a commercial
kitchen and converted it into a root beer brewery. A small one. We sold
Sparky's on tap in kegs for two years, then we decided to start bottling it.
That turned out to be very labor intensive so now we have a deal with The
Coast Range Brewery in the town of Gilroy nearby. Spark's is now kettle
brewed in a nice big kettle and conditioned in large stainless steel tanks
and bottled at the brewery.

A package arrived on Friday just before Round Eleven of the Root Beer Showdown. I opened the box to find a large 22 oz. bottle and a strong aroma of root beer. At first I worried that the carbonation had leaked under the bottlecap, and that the brew would be flat by the time we tasted it. But in the test it seemed just fine and perfectly frothed in our sample cups. Indeed, the flavor proved to be a favorite of a number of the reviewers, and an extra bonus of the huge bottle was that there was enough root beer left over in the bottle for another round for everyone.