Birch beer
Kutztown Birch Beer
Kutztown Soda Works (Kutztown Bottling Works) · Classic brown (root-bite) birch beer
Kutztown, Pennsylvania, USA
A cane-sugar brown birch beer from a Pennsylvania bottler that has been at it since 1851, this leans hard into the nostalgic, county-fair end of the category. Despite the birch billing, the dominant note is a sweet "root bite" that pushes it close to a root beer, with only a faint wintergreen-birch lift underneath and a soft caramel-sweet backbone. It pours very sweet with a soda-fountain quality and a fairly short finish, so it reads more as an easygoing crowd-pleaser than a delicate, birch-forward sipper. A safe, well-made comfort pour for fans of sweet brown sodas rather than a study in birch character.
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The maker
Kutztown Soda Works (also operating as Kutztown Bottling Works) is a Pennsylvania Dutch-country soda maker tracing its roots to 1851, in the borough of Kutztown. The current business was acquired by Jeff and Dana Taylor in 2007, and it continues to bottle old-fashioned sodas built on early-1900s recipes, sweetened with pure cane sugar and made caffeine-free. Its birch beer is one of its signature flavors, drawing on the region's long birch-beer tradition.
Ingredients & nutrition
Triple filtered carbonated water, Pure cane sugar, Caramel color, Natural and artificial flavor, Citric acid, Sodium benzoate (preservative), Yucca extractives, Acacia.