I had seen Norka in my travels to Ohio in 2019 & in 2023 but I had been putting it on the back burner in favor of getting other hard to find root beers. Norka is Akron spelled backwards and it is a city I have traveled to and through in all of my visits to Ohio. It’s almost like a hometown root beer of sorts. It’s a very vanilla forward root beer. It has a slight bite to start off and then has a good creamy profile throughout. Also, there’s not much of an aftertaste. I like it, I just don’t love it. It’s way better than average and yet falls short of making it to top tier. Regardless, it’s a solid choice if you can find it and there is nothing that will hold it back or turn you off.
It’s been years (2019) since I reviewed the original Fitz root beer. I haven’t tried it since largely because with a few exceptions (Sprecher, Barq’s, A&W, & Dang) it’s onward to new root beers I haven’t tried before. It’s been so long since I had Fitz’s, the pride of Missouri, that I had to re-read the review to get my mind set for the diet version. I said the original version was clean, crisp, light tasting with a nice vanilla aftertaste. And honestly, that would be a good description of this one. It’s incredibly light tasting and because it’s diet, it’s not sweet at all. I got a little whiff of aspartame in the aftertaste but unlike a lot of diet drinks, it’s barely noticeable. For a diet drink, this is totally serviceable for those looking to save some calories & considering there wasn’t anything that turned me off and grading on a no sugar curve, it’s an above average drink. If I ever completely run out of root beers to revi. 
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