It’s always best to have a brewing buddy around. Your buddy can keep you from
getting bored, think of new ideas to tweak your brew, and help you double check measurements.
Gabe is my new brewing buddy. We ran out of root beer a couple weeks ago and he helped me brew up a new batch. It might be a while before I teach him how to brew a stiff IPA, but for root beer this kid is the best.
We use the kitchen scale for all of our measurements. Once everything is in a big bowl we dump it into hot but not boiling water and stir it until it’s dissolved. Then I put the mixture into the five gallon keg and fill the rest of the way with water. Once carbonated it makes a pretty decent root beer and a seriously excellent root beer float.
Here are the ingredients for the latest brew:
Honey: 251g
Mild Molasses: 30g
Maple Syrup: 108g
Sugar: 1199g
Nutmeg (freshly ground): 1 nut
Root Beer Extract: 4 oz
We didn’t go crazy with the recipe this time around. The key is sugar and root beer extract. Sometimes I add cardamoms, vanilla extract, or cinnamon sticks. I didn’t happen to have any of those around and therefore went with the nutmeg. I made sure to filter out the powder when I was pouring into the keg, otherwise I think the keg would probably clog. I’ve had this happen with hops in a badly filtered beer and it is not fun.
It turned out pretty well. When compare this to the original recipe from a years-ago Google search I find that my recipe has changed quite a bit. At the time there weren’t a lot of recipes out there so I took what I could find and modified it to my tastes. It still changes every time I make it, but the core ingredients stay mostly the same.
Well, there you go, Internet. A root beer recipe for others to copy and modify to their own tastes.
Enjoy.
But makes sure you have a helper.