Old Fashioned Root Beer - Alcoholic Style

It's one of those soft drinks that divides opinion like few others. A love it / hate it sort of beverage. Most people I know really don't like it, even when I've introduced them to the good varieties out there as supposed to the false, artificial flavoured ****e that normally comes in a can.

Living in Ireland, it isn't that easy to get your hands on good quality root beer. Nor is it cheap when you do. £2 for a 330ml bottle is a little steep, in my opinion. So I bought some natural ingredients and made my own (a non-alcoholic version). I made about 5 or 6 litres as a tester and it turned out very well. Little bit heavy on the liquorice / aniseed flavour (I blame using too much star anise for that) but still very nice, I thought, and it mellowed out after a while.

So, you know what has to be done next, don't you! Let's make an alcoholic version. The recipe is as follows, for a 15 litre batch:

75g sarsaparilla root
75g birch bark
20g yellow dock root
20g cinnamon sticks
20g liquoruce sticks
20g clove powder (would have preferred whole cloves)

Boil that up for a good 30 minutes in a muslin bag. Then add 20ml of vanilla extract, 270g of molasses, 1.2kg of golden sugar, 2 heaped teaspoons of yeast nutrient and 2 heaped teaspoons of cream of tartar powder. Stir well and transfer to the FV. Fill up to 15 litres with cold water. check the temperature is ok before you pitch the yeast.

The SG was 1036 so if it gets down to 1006, it'll be 4% ABV.

I'll let you all know how it goes. Quite looking forward to trying it.

Update: Bottled the batch last night. FG was 1002 so it's approx 4.5% ABV. Used 100g of regular granulated white sugar as primer and 100 Splenda sweetener tablets to try and avoid any bitterness / sharpness.

A week in the hot-press, then a week in the spare room and it should be good to try. If it's anything like the non-alcohol version I brewed (but with a kick) then I'll be more than happy.

Brewing from scratch is a lot more satisfying....and fun.

I really like the taste of root beer, although I've only tasted the stuff in bottles. Hope it turns out well for you - it will be a triumph!

Very interested to here the outcome of this experiment.

Tried one a few days before the two weeks were up and it didn't taste ready. Tried one last Sunday, which was beyond the date I set for completion, and it tasted very similar. I'm following the same rules I applied to my homebrew alcoholic ginger beer, and that turned out really well, so I'm not quite sure what's taking so long. They are both 'root beers' so you'd imagine the same rules would apply.

Maybe it'll never taste right. Maybe it takes a lot longer to mature properly. Maybe I fooked something up whilst making it.

I'll have another blast of one this weekend and report back. Not confident it'll be a glowing report. Dang!