What Kind of Snake Oil is in That Bottle Anyway?

Despite the old-fashioned, personable appeal of many root beer brands, the actual process of bottling a brand of root beer remains very much a modern mystery. Many small breweries allow tours of their beer-making facilities, but why don't they show where and how the root beer is made? How much root beer manufacturing takes place in nondescript warehouses in nameless suburban industrial parks? Like so many grocery store generic products, are all these different brands merely the same items sold in different packages?

This brings us to the case of Torpedo Juice root beer. This brand is sold exclusively at the Wisconsin Maritime Museum in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Sales of the brew raise funds to benefit the museum. When we visited, they had set up an attractive display of the bottles in a wooden boat outside the gift shop. Its a great souvenir of a visit to the interesting and entertaining museum. The bottle features the unsusual image of a happy whale or fish riding or perhaps mating with a torpedo, but the colors are bright and make for a distinctive label.

However, noting that the bottlecap was exactly the same as those on bottles of Baumeister Root Beer, made in nearby Kewaunee, Wisconsin, we suspected a conspiracy. We wanted to know if these two brands were the same flavor sold under two different names, at two different prices.

In Round 9 of testing, we put these two brands head-to-head. Strangely enough, in the randomly selected order of sampling, they ended up in sample slots D and E, one right after another. From the immediate taste comparison from one sample to the next it was obvious: these two "brands" are exactly the same product.