Roots Organic Island Red
February 27th, 2008Brewery: Roots Organic Brewing
Style: Red Ale 
BeerAdvocate.com Rating: C
RateBeer.com Rating: 3.41 (78th percentile)
Serving: 22oz Bottle
Note: Just for fun both the Bearded Brewing Company and I have decided to simultaneously review this beer on our sites to see what each other though about this one. After reading this review, stop by the Bearded Brewing Company blog to see what Eric thought. If you’ve arrived here from Bearded Brewing, thanks for checking out my site.
Roots is an all organic brewery located in Portland, Oregon that is most notable for being perhaps the most active brewery in the entire pacific northwest in terms of environmental activism. They also created the first all organic beer festival in Oregon and I believe they were also the first brewery in Oregon to go all organic. Needless to say, their list of accomplishments is quite large.
Since I’m a fan of both red and organic ales, it was an easy decision to pick this one up. I’ve had their Woody IPA before and while it wasn’t completely unique in the oceans of IPAs out there, it was definitely delicious. Let’s see what this one is all about.
We call this a RED stout. Very full bodied complex ale brewed with a good amount of oats and barley, which lend to the nice bread and malt flavors and help Give this RED a very rich & creamy head.
Red stout, huh? I’m all for innovation, so here goes nothing:
Appearance - Mahogany body that’s still clear enough to let a health amount of light through. Pours with a healthy finger or two’s worth of tan, frothy head.
Smell - Typical hoppy smells of a red ale, but with a much higher malt tone that tags along behind the hops.
Taste - Wow, that definitely is unique. Factor in all of the standard red ale tastes, take it down a notch or two in what a typical northwest red has in hops flavor, and factor in what I’m sorting out as either a toffee or coffee hue due to the higher malt content. I see how Roots kinda sorta spins this as a red stout not by the name, but by the mixture of flavors you get. It’s definitely tasty, but it’s also difficult to review as I can’t think of anything even remotely similar.
It looks like folks on BeerAdvocate are complaining about this being unbalanced due to the hops and not the malt, but I’m going to go ahead and attribute that to said reviewers being wusses. This isn’t even in the upper 50% of hoppy beers out there, so I don’t understand that argument. I do see how some folks might complain about this being unbalanced. I, however, think this is a delicious and incredibly unique brew. Pick up a bottle if you get a chance to, if anything, try something I guarantee you haven’t experienced before.
Remember to check out the Bearded Brewing Company as well to see Eric’s thoughts on this brew.
It’s definitely a terrific beer. I think Roots is definitely at their best when they’re pushing boundaries. Island red, gruit kolsch, coconut porter, Epic ale… All completely unique and very well made.
Comment by Beau — February 28, 2008 @ 12:22 am