9 - Sunset Sarsaparilla
Jones Soda Co. created Sunset Sarsaparilla in association with Fallout, which is both a videogame and a TV series. I haven’t tried the game or the show, but I did try the Sarsaparilla.
You see sarsaparilla mentioned in many Western movies and TV shows, but finding the drink can be challenging. It is refreshing to find it so often now, but you still need to search for it. For example, you won’t likely find any at Wal-Mart or Target. You have to go to a grocery store, and even then, it has to have a specialty drink section.
Hy-Vee is one of the few grocery stores that seems interested in having a wide variety of speciality sodas. If you have one near you, you can probably find this drink or a different kind of sarsaparilla.
Branding
From a branding point of view, everything I have read says that the drink looks like the one in the show / game.
The logo and colors look nice. I really liked the cap. I kind of wish they had done more with that shade of red in the bottle label too.
Taste and Ingredients
When you first open the bottle, you can smell something kind of like sweet licorice. However, when you take your first mouthful, it has a medicinal taste. This is definitely not a root beer or normal sarsaparilla flavor. Maybe a cross between Coke and root beer with a more cola flavor. I have seen some commenters call it a cross between root beer and grape soda, but I don’t really taste any grape.
You get that medicinal hit right after it enters your mouth, and it lingers as an aftertaste, too. The sarsaparilla is not flat, but not as sharp as soda water either.
From an ingredients point of view, you can see that they use a lot of the same ingredients you find in root beer.
I don’t know where the weird taste comes from, except perhaps the generic “natural flavor” listed above.
The Wrap Up
All in all, I enjoyed the look and smell of the drink, but I didn’t really care for the taste. I probably wouldn’t buy this often except to try it with friends. There are much better sarsaparillas out there, such as Snake River or Sioux City. If you’d like to try a sarsaparilla, I would try one of those first.