How to make root beer at home

Epicurious.com

I have mentioned that I have a serious root-beer habit and that I've been making my own root beer at home now for about a year or so. A couple people were interested in how one goes about making homemade root beer, so I'll give you a step-by-step guide right here. It's remarkably easy, if you're using an extract.

(If, on the other hand, you're willing to spend a lot of time and effort collecting various hard-to-find fresh herbs and plants like sassafras, wintergreen, licorice root, sarsaparilla root, spikenard root and cherry-tree bark, well, more power to you.)

For everyone else, here's what I do:

1 tablespoon root-beer extract
1 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon yeast (whatever kind you have in your kitchen)
cool water
2-liter bottle or growler jug

1. Purchase root-beer extract. My favorite is Zatarain's, and I buy it by the dozen to alleviate shipping costs. Zatarain's, by the way, got its start not as a purveyor of jambalaya mixes or crab boil, but as a seller of root-beer extract.

2. Clean out a two-liter soda bottle or, better yet, a growler jug for beer. I don't know why, but I'm convinced the root beer in the glass growler jug tastes better than that from the plastic bottles.

3. Using a funnel, pour the 1 cup sugar into the bottle.

4. Pour the 1/4 tsp. yeast into the bottle. Shake the bottle so that the yeast and sugar are mixed well.

5. Pour the 1 tbl. root-beer extract into the bottle.

6. Fill the bottle about one-quarter full of cold water and shake well so that the sugar and yeast are dissolved.

7. Fill up the bottle with water until nearly but not quite full, leaving an inch or two of space from the lid.

8. Leave out the bottle in a warm spot for 2-3 days. After 2-3 days, refrigerate the root beer and enjoy whenever you want. If the root beer's still too flat, you can leave it out again and let it carbonate some more, but if you leave it out too long, you risk the bottle exploding. Root beer is a lot less enjoyable when it's dripping from your kitchen ceiling.

It's about as simple a recipe as you can get, but I'm almost very happy with the results. I've found that straying from the proportions even a little bit seems usually to lead to flat root beer, yeasty root beer, bland root beer or sickly sweet root beer, so I don't fiddle around with the recipe too much. Also, note that the root beer will be very slightly alcoholic, if that's an issue for you for some reason (you won't get a buzz off of it or anything).

In the summer, I like to make root-beer ice cream (using a Philadelphia-style vanilla ice-cream base) and then use it for root-beer floats.

Michael Y. Park is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. He studied medieval history as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, and journalism as a graduate student at New York University. His stories have appeared in publications including The New York Times, the New York Post, and the Toronto Globe and Mail.




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