How to make root-beer

Let's make root-beer.

Step 1. Watch six or so YouTube root-beer videos and become an expert.

This guy kills me. He does very well. He's good and charming besides at explaining and comments to his video show his viewers greatly appreciate what he's done. He's made a lot of batches and tweaked his recipe to suit his preferences and now he's sharing what he knows.

What gets me is his opening video art display page reminded me of the Tea Party protest signs when they first appeared on the political scene, the day I saw them walking past the front door on Broadway near the state capitol. Their signage veritably screamed that none of them took any art classes that covered graphics. As compared with, say, the homemade signage put together by the thousands of San Francisco residents that came out to cheer along Bat Kid that all look like every single citizen majored in graphic design. That was awesome. There's this thing about lettering and spacing and wordage, and messaging, color and font choice. Steve Allen chose a different font for each line. If you have a sense for this sort of thing then you find that basic error hilarious. Because your eyeballs go goofy reading it.

Here's the thing. You make a tea out of strange botanic ingredients that you never even heard of, like a witch over a cauldron, and let it steep for over half an hour up to an hour. Then you add various sugars of your choice and your own amounts, honey, molasses, brown sugar, refined cane sugar, regular beet sugar, maltodextrin.

If you use brown sugar that includes molasses. Dark brown sugar has more molasses than light brown sugar. Maltodextrin is included to change mouth-feel, to make the liquid thicker. Too much maltodextrin affects flavor negatively.

The sugar is to make the herbal tea sweet to your taste and as importantly it feeds yeast that provides carbonation.

I know from aquarium hobby the potential for disaster. You can put one speck of yeast in each bottle and the sugar loaded inside will cause the yeast to multiply exponentially and keep going until the sugars are gone. Then your liquid contains the remains of dead yeast cells. Your root-beer will be filled with actual living cells, and yeast-death.

When I mentioned that to Jiva, a longtime Hare Krishna friend, in relation to making sourdough bread, he cracked up laughing. I didn't intend to amuse him. There was something about bread being filled with yeast-death, and eating it, that Jiva found lastingly funny.

The root-beer brewers cannot control the yeast development by limiting the sugar because they need a lot of sugar for taste.

Most of the videos show the brewers adding minuscule amounts of yeast to each bottle. It seems to me the yeast can be dissolved more evenly for each bottle by adding yeast to the pot and not to each bottle.

Except for Kurt Dresner. The shirt he is wearing indicates he brews his own beer. He makes root-beer by the keg intended for regular beer. He carbonates mechanically so he uses much less sugar than the others. His root-beer also tastes like crap. Because of the hops he put into it.

One of the brewers, KDORVY, I think, likes the balance of vanilla and honey that he tastes in A&W root-beer. If I'm recalling correctly. He's the only person I've ever heard recommend vanilla flavoring over vanilla extract and over vanilla beans. And he adds a lot, 1/2 cup. (I'm surprised it isn't 3/8 cup, given his non-standard measurement fixation.) Martha Stewart would frown. She's a vanilla elitist. She'd insist Madagascar vanilla beans are the only way to go, on principle. Or else Thai vanilla beans for their floral quality, again, on principle. And Steven Allen added a vanilla bean but he didn't cut it open to expose the goo and the seeds. Everyone who uses vanilla beans knows you slice them lengthwise and scrape them out to use the sludge inside them.

It seems the sort of thing you'll want to do in small batches because the bottles go into the refrigerator after a few days to retard yeast CO2 production to near stop at 3 days, even then results are unpredictable. The bottles can explode. The bottles can foam all over the place when they're opened. It's not an exact science.

Here's a spreadsheet showing the range of ingredients. Tiny House doesn't go so far as the others. Theirs is an incomplete effort. This brewer omits a lot of ingredients the other brewers consider essential.

KDORVY has a fixation on amounts just under 1/2 cup and just under 1/2 teaspoon. Somewhere along his arc he concluded that 1/2 of cup and ounce is just a little too much so his recipe states, 3/8 this and that. He takes a very long time to explain his ways. While he is singular in recommending a source for ingredients. And I appreciate that. He never did mention the total amount of water. He did state amounts but in fractions. He'll take out 1 gallon and treat it separately, He'll add back 1 + 12 gallon to double the original tea and cool it. So then, 3 gallons.

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Doesn't this sound like fun? What could go wrong?

I might have missed something or messed up on this spreadsheet. I had technical difficulties between Text Edit and Photoshop, and I had to follow along the videos to put it together. I might have something in the wrong place, or omitted something. Lines shifted as I went and the program locked up. Still, I think this chart gives a good idea of the range of ingredients and the range of amounts and the range of techniques. It shows you have a very broad margin for error. And it shows in the end you must develop your own recipe to suit your personal taste.

Kurt Dresner put hops in root-beer because he grows hops at his home. And he brews beer. Who would even want that bitter ingredient in their root beer besides a regular beer brewer? He has a room in his home devoted to brewing beer. This root-beer diversion is mere goofing around from his main interest. He's sipping one his own pilsners as he does this, and that's how we know that it takes him exactly 1/2 hour to drink one of his own beers.

When we brewed beer downstairs we did a similar thing. We brewed a wheat tea. Then changed the temperature and brewed hops into it. Before the hops we tasted the wheat tea and after the toothpaste taste disappeared the wheat flavored tea was very nice. That gave me the idea of just steeping cracked apart wheat berries, steep them in hot water that's not boiling and drink it as tea. It has an excellent taste. 

Then they wreck it with two types of hops and alcohol and carbonation. 

Actually, I liked the beer very much. Best beer I ever tasted. But the wheat tea at the first stage was better. More peaceful. More serene. Whoever discovered fermentation and made it a thing was one of humanity's original crackpots. Not saying that's a bad thing.

And come to think of it, CO2 is a product of yeast consuming the sugar and so is alcohol. So if this goes on for more than a few days then your root-beer will become increasingly alcoholic.