welcome friends since we started making pop a lot of people have been asking for
a root beer and I'm about eight variations in at this point and I think
I've got something that works pretty well so I'm gonna show that one to you
today in this pot I put 1 liter of water and some ginger that I have chopped up
fairly fine now you could grate the ginger if you
wanted to just to extract it a little bit more flavor and I'm going to put in
one cinnamon stick and yes I know this isn't true cinnamon
this is cassia if you can get true cinnamon use it but I think the cassia
actually brings the punch to this that we're looking for so I put this in a pot
and I'm going to bring this up to a boil and I'm gonna boil it for two to three
minutes to extract as much flavor as I can from those two ingredients now we're
gonna talk about the roots since this is root beer now this is sassafras and
sassafras is the major main flavor component in root beer and I saw a lot
of root beer recipes out there on the internet and in books where this was the
only ingredient beyond sugar and water relied extremely heavily on this one
flavor and I thought it made a pretty good tasting beverage but I wanted a
little bit more complexity so I started looking at other recipes that added
other roots and the next most popular route is sarsaparilla and if you watched
a lot of old westerns you would know that the cowboy would go in and he would
ask for a sarsaparilla and that is a variation on root beer that is only made
with the sarsaparilla root and I like the flavor of both of these next flavor
component thing going to use is licorice root you know what licorice tastes like
that sort of anise seed dark sweet flavor and then I'm gonna put in some
wild cherry bark now other components that I saw in a lot of recipes and I
tried and I didn't like was birch bark a lot of people put in burdock root or
dandelion root or all three of those and I thought they brought kind of a an
extra bitterness that I didn't want in my root beer so that's the
combination of roots that I landed on and I would suggest that if you're going
to make root beer go out and look at all of the recipes and take each of the
individual roots and make a cup of hot tea with it
put in a little bit of sugar and taste it just so you can get an idea of what
that individual root tastes like and what it's going to bring to the eventual
end product I think that's very important to sort of understand what all
of the components are and I'm also giving you this by weight I came across
a lot of recipes that said to use a tablespoon of this and a tablespoon of
that and that's great but not all of these roots are ground to the same way
or chopped the same way and so you would get a big variation in the amount of
flavor that you're going to get in the end result which isn't good either
weight is always going to give you the same amount of flavor so this has come
to a boil it's boiled for a couple of minutes I'm going to turn it off I'm
going to take it off of the heat and I'm going to add these in I'm gonna give it
a stir and then put the lid back on and I'm gonna let that steep for 15 to 20
minutes just to extract the flavors now this is where I diverge from a lot of
the recipes that I found I tried it by putting all of the roots in and boiling
it like I was told for 10 15 20 minutes and then letting it steep for 2 or 3
hours and I found that it extracted an astringent see almost a bitterness well
a lot of tannins that caused an unpleasant feeling in my mouth that I
just didn't like a flavor that I didn't like it wasn't bright and it wasn't
cheerful like a root beer should be and I found that if I never boiled the roots
if I boil the water and then add the roots and only let it steep for 15 to 20
minutes you're going to get really nice bright flavors without sort of the
tannic astringency so we're gonna let this go 15 20 minutes and then we're
going to strain it out
okay smells amazing now we need to filter out the solids and this is a very
important step if the solids stay in too long they will continue to release their
astringency and over time it'll start to taste really dull so we need to strain
them out and we're gonna use a fine mesh strainer to get the big bits out look at
that color
great now that we've got the big bits out we're going to strain it through a
coffee filter now I have used paper coffee filters I've used double
thickness paper coffee filters I've used double thickness paper cup four filters
with this micro mesh filter and I found that the micro mesh filter on its own
gets just as much as the paper filters or any combination thereof so we're
going to pass it through the coffee filter great now I'm gonna put a lid on
this and I'm going to chill this as quickly as possible in a cold water bath
I'm going to bring the temperature down fast and that's going to help whatever
is left in here to precipitate out it's almost as effective as a filter and
in some ways it's our second or third method of filtration and as soon as
that's done we'll move on
okay now that it's chilled down we need to sweeten it and we're going to use two
different types of sugar but first we're going to very carefully pour the chilled
liquid into this pot and you don't want to swirl it you want to pour very
carefully because at the bottom there's going to be quite a bit of sediment left
and we don't want to transfer that to the pot
okay what's left in there is sediment and that will just make the drink bitter
we don't want that now next in is the sugar we're using two kinds of sugar and
I found that sugar for pop making seems to be very vexing to a lot of people the
first thing I'm going to put in is brown sugar and we've got this on a
medium-high heat and we just want to bring this up to a
low simmer so that we can dissolve the sugar into the liquid
we don't wanna bring it to a boil again because that could introduce bitterness
just a low low simmer and I'm using brown sugar a lot of the recipes that I
found use brown sugar or molasses or a combination of brown and white sugar or
just white sugar or white sugar and molasses it was all over the map and I
think it comes down to the flavor profile that you're looking for I'm
looking for that little bit of caramel flavor that comes from the brown sugar
so I'm using all brown sugar as the sweetener if you want to use another
sweetener a non sugar sweetener like stevia I'm sure that'll work I don't
know what the proportion would be this is something that you can play with and
make it as sweet or not sweet as you want but know this if you're going to do
this as a naturally carbonated root beer which is part of the process that we're
going to move on to stevia won't work the yeast needs sugar
so as this comes up the temperature I'm gonna put in lactose and obviously if
you're lactose intolerant you're not going to put lactose in I'm gonna put
lactose in for a bunch of different reasons I use it in actual beer brewing
down in the brewery and as much as it's a sweetener it's not gonna bring a whole
lot of sweetness to this drink and so the lactose is going to do a few
things for us the first thing it's going to do is it's going to give that nice
white creamy frothy foamy head that we all associate with root beer as it
spills over the top of the glass in all of the advertising the second thing it's
going to do it's going to create a nice unctuous mouthfeel a really luxurious
kind of stays in your mouth mouthfeel that we all associate with root beer and
as much as I said that it's not going to add a lot of sweetness if you end up
doing a natural ferment or naturally carbonated version with the with the
yeast yeast don't eat or the East that we're using anyway these that we're
using won't eat the lactose or milk sugar which will in the end help to
preserve some of the sweetness okay I think everything is dissolved and we can
pour this into this glass container and
I'm just going to let this cool before we move on to the next step now there's
one last ingredient and that is vanilla extract now we're gonna put in about a
tablespoon I found that anywhere between a
tablespoon and a tablespoon and a half gets you where you want to be and a lot
of people are gonna ask if you could use vanilla bean and I've tried it with
vanilla beans I've tried it with double vanilla beans I found that by the time i
steeped the vanilla bean to get the flavor I wanted I pulled out too much
astringency from the roots and so the best way to get that vanilla flavor is
with the extract that I found and you give it a try if you want to try it at
home please do so that's all mixed together now we're gonna diverge this is
your root beer syrup and you mix one part of this with three parts of
carbonated water and you get a root beer pop just like you would at the corner
store I'm also going to do a version where we ferment it with our ginger bug
our wild ginger bug so in here I'm gonna put about five hundred mils just like
that and the rest is going to go into this jug
okay now for the naturally fermented or naturally carbonated ginger beer I'm
going to use about a third of a cup of my ginger bug and my ginger bug is is
pretty active it's in good shape and I think that should be enough to get us
where we're going so I'm gonna put that in and I know from previous test that
this yeast is only going to give me somewhere between one and a half and two
percent alcohol by volume when it what it ferments out I'm just gonna putting a
little bit more I think a little bit of the yeast settled in the bottom and so I
want to put some more in okay stir that in now I've got flip-top beer bottles
these are really strong actual beer bottles that will take the pressure
there cleaned and sanitized yes of course I've sanitized my bottles and we
just stir in the ginger bug to make sure that it's evenly distributed and then we
just pour it into the bottles now when you pour it in you want to leave enough
headspace for the expansion of gas while these ferment so I just bring it up just
a little bit past the shoulder and that should be fine close it up and move
along okay so last one seal it up I'll leave these on the counter for two maybe
three days to allow them to ferment and carbonate and then I'll stick them in
the fridge and I'll see you in a few days and we're gonna do a tasting of
both versions
okay so there is carbonation so this is root beer two ways this is the syrup
that I've mixed with carbonated water and this is the one that we put the
ginger bug in is it carbonated mmm not so carbonated light carbonation so I
should have left it on the counter longer oh but when you give it a moment
yeah it is it is carbonated so that was three
days on the counter before I put it in the fridge maybe four days would have
been better no so let's taste it color is different yes okay so I'll try
this one first I'll try this one first
it's a very pleasant flavor
I think that one's more rootbeer II completely different our thing that we
drive missing root beer I would say that one this one always a very pleasant
flavor it's just super I think the so it seemed to me the fermentation with the
ginger bug okay has taken some of the chop flavors off the ones that use that
are there that initial oh this is root beer that I'm drinking oh that's that's
a lovely root beer that's full-on root beer isn't it this is this is something
that you would but that's quite their book it's very refreshing and pleasant I
mean some more bubbles would be nice they're both great in their own way so
dare two more on the counter in order to ferment that to bring up the level go
ahead I was gonna say we did a bunch of did we do multiple different days in
this no I just put it over for three days and said three days should be okay
so probably so I'm gonna I'm gonna pull the rest of the bottles out of the
fridge heat them up again and just let them come to room temperature go for a
couple more days and then put them back in the fridge which is something you can
do to test your fermentation as you go along anyway so this is a very basic
root beer recipe and there's so much more that you can add to it as you as
you look at the labels of other root beers there's so many other things that
people put in it other than just the roots so there's aniseed or I mean like
they'll put in a whole bunch of other things and we put licorice root in here
so the anise seed would bring that licorice flavor up yes it would sort of
enhanced that but I think that is sort of the classic root beer flavor that
most people mm-hmm now we need to test it against other root beers so I've got
a half-dozen other root beers and we're gonna do we're gonna do a taste-off
between all of them so come on back and and see that video and give this recipe
try thanks for stopping by again soon
you