Hard Root Beer
Small Town Brewery offers a sample of their Not Your Father's Root Beer spiced beer at the American Beer Classic craft beer festival at Soldier Field on May 9 in Chicago, Illinois Getty Images/Scott Olson

The hottest new craft beer on the market seems to be generating buzz in more ways than one. Not Your Father's Root Beer packs the punch of a brewskie but tastes and smells like the old-timey soda. With drinkers from coast to coast looking for the briskly selling brew, some are questioning who's behind the increasingly popular drink.

The beverage is brewed by Small Town Brewery of Illinois. The story goes that a graphic artist stumbled upon the recipe during a home-brewing day with his son. And the rest, supposedly, is history.

Buzz about the brew has been growing as it hits stores nationwide. The hard root beer can be found as far south as Florida and as far West as Los Angeles, and it's been flying off shelves so fast that it's been difficult to find in some places.

According to the brewery, the drink is made like a beer, but it has the traditional flavoring of root beer, including cinnamon, wintergreen, anise, vanilla and sarsaparilla bark.

Not Your Father’s Root Beer isn’t the only soda-style drink hitting the market: Coney Island Hard Root Beer has also been expanding its reach. That product is produced by Coney Island Brewery, which is a subsidiary of Boston Brewing Company, maker of Sam Adams.

With the rise of hard root beer, fans wonder if Not Your Father’s Root Beer could really be from a small-scale brewery after all?

The Philadelphia Daily News questioned it, saying the process is quite complex for an up-and-coming brewer to master. Further, the bottling for Not Your Father’s Root Beer is done by City Brewing, which also brews Mike’s Hard Lemonade and Smirnoff Ice. The paper also finds other links to the Phusion Projects LLC, the company behind Four Loko, including the same location and the same employees.

It would make sense that larger-scale breweries are attempting to get in on the craft beer market. Craft beer sales are growing faster than any other segment of the beer market, with combined sales of $19.6 billion this year alone.

Small company? Big company? Does it really even matter, as long as it tastes good? We definitely see boozy root beer floats on the horizon.