How to Make Root Beer | Old Fashioned Homemade Root Beer Recipe

Old-fashioned root beer. Look at that. Oh my god, that looks amazing. It's incredible. Whoa! We just made root beer. Welcome back to the fermentation adventure. This week I really feel like a kid again. We are making a recipe that has been so requested by you guys, more than any other. If you guys love ginger ale, you are really going to love this recipe. Homemade old-fashioned root beer with fermentation. By the end of this video, we are going to have our own homemade fermented root beer. All natural and actually pretty good for you. On top of that, you want to stay tuned because we're going to turn it into a root beer float. Oh my gosh. Let's get started. Join us on this journey to explore the world of fermentation. If you'd like to learn how to make ferments like these, start now by clicking subscribe and hitting that bell so you don't miss a thing. So today we are making a half gallon recipe. And that makes four bottles of root beer. Because we love root beer. We make as much as we can. So the first step, we're kind of making a tea. Boil some water and put all of our ingredients in there. So it's actually called a decoction in the medicinal world. But we're going to get all of the flavor out of there. So then we have all the flavor for a really good root beer. And we're going to start by adding some water to a pot on the stove. And we want to estimate to use about three-fourths of our half gallon size jar. The reason we want to do that is we're going to be adding ingredients to this later. So we don't want to add too much water where we have overflow. And don't worry, later we'll go ahead and top off this mason jar and make sure we have as much root beer as possible. Remember that it's important to use non-chlorinated water, such as either filtered or distilled water, so that the chlorine doesn't kill your ferment. Just going to pour that into the pot. I'm going to wait to set this to boil because we have some ingredients to add. Now it took a little bit of experimenting to find a flavor that really tasted like root beer to us. So you're going to see a lot of different ingredients here, but it's important to note that when you think of root beer, it's probably more likely it would be called roots beer. Roots beer! Because it's a combination of roots and that's where you get the best flavor. If you just added one root, it wouldn't taste as good as if you had a combination of them. The taste of roots beer is a combination of wintergreen, vanilla, and licorice flavors. So you put all those together and that's what we traditionally know as roots beer. And so if you can't find some of these ingredients at home or they're too expensive, because some of them are, feel free to experiment by excluding some of them and trying it out and seeing, you know, what tastes good to you. Maybe it tastes like root beer to you, minus one of the ingredients. You'll notice there's a lot of different types of root beer out there and they all taste different, so whatever you come up with is probably going to taste pretty good. So the first ingredient we're going to add to our pot of water is dried sassafras root bark. Oh, that's a mouthful. And I have it right here. It smells like root beer. If there's one ingredient over all of the others that taste or smell like root beer, it's definitely sassafras. It's amazing. It really looks like a tree bark, but I guess that's what it is. And the next ingredient we're going to use is a fourth cup of dried sarsaparilla root. If you're looking for this in the store or online, it's going to be Jamaican sarsaparilla root. Because it's actually a very popular export from Jamaica. Sarsaparilla is a really interesting ingredient because sometimes I feel like it's not really needed for root beer and yet it's oddly satisfying in our root beer. It adds some sort of a stringent cardboardy texture and taste. Bartender, give me a sarsaparilla. It's actually considered the father of root beer because before root beer was root beer, there was a sarsaparilla drink and that's where cowboys would stumble into the bar and order a sarsaparilla. But then they added sassafras and other root type flavors and it became what is now known as roots beer or root beer. And another characteristic of root beer that you know as root beer is the foam. And sarsaparilla is one of those foaming agents. It has something called saponins that makes a soapy kind of bubble. So whenever you pour it, the bubbles bubble up and you have the foam that stays on the top. I'm seriously expecting a lot of foam in our root beer. I'm so excited. Next, what would a root beer be without fresh ginger root? Add that spiciness. So we're going to add two tablespoons of chopped fresh ginger root. You can either peel the ginger or leave the skin on. It really doesn't matter. But the important thing is to chop it up to help release all those good flavors into the pot. And just like we love ginger ale, fresh ginger is going to give us a little bit of spice to our root beer. Next, we're adding some cinnamon and we're going to use a half of an actual cinnamon stick. Did you know that this came from a tree? It's the tree bark. It's incredible. Now, if you don't have a cinnamon stick, no worries. You can go ahead and use half the amount. So one fourth of a teaspoon of ground cinnamon. And I wouldn't add too much cinnamon. Be careful of that because then it'll turn into like a holiday drink. And root beer, as we all know, is any time. Like we said before, one of the best flavors of root beer is the licorice flavor. One of the best ways to add licorice flavor is to add an ingredient called star anise. And we are adding two pods of star anise. Let's take a look at this licorice overload. But look at these. These are like perfect little stars. They're so cool. This is kind of like the coolest ingredient, I think, for a root beer. If you don't have this ingredient, you can also add something called anise, which are these little tiny seeds, but they are not the same thing. And like Paul mentioned, you can use something called anise seed and they really are completely different. So look at these little tiny seeds. You could also use instead licorice root or even fennel, which looks like a bigger version of anise seeds. Lastly, this is an optional ingredient that we're going to add. It's one fourth a teaspoon of ground coriander or half a teaspoon of whole coriander. This is just going to add a little bit more of a bold flavor, maybe just a little bit bitter. It like enhances your root beer. It's incredible. You would not think that coriander would be good in root beer, but oh my gosh, we tried it with and without and we love it. But just a little bit. So let's add a fourth teaspoon to the pot. If you know what cilantro is, this is ground cilantro seeds. That's amazing. I love cilantro. Another ingredient we would have loved to add is birch bark, and that adds quite a good wintergreen flavor. It's a little bit rare, but it's also traditionally found in root beer. And there are so many other ingredients that you could actually use, like all different kinds of roots to create your own flavor root beer. So to give you a quick idea, you could add things like citrus, lime, lemon. You could use yucca. Oh, that actually makes it a little bit more bubbly, just like a sarsaparilla. Nice. You could use dandelion root and burdock, all kinds of stuff. It depends on where you are in the world and, you know, what ingredients you have access to. As far as sarsaparilla and sassafras, I want to also mention that we're going to be experimenting with creating a root beer without those ingredients in a future video, because obviously with it being harder to find, and there are, they're very expensive. They're very expensive. So we want to be able to make root beer without those. So we're going to experiment and let you know. We are ready to bring our ingredients to a boil. Turn the heat on high, bring it to a boil, and we're actually going to cover it just to make sure not too much of the liquid boils out of it. We want all the flavor. We're going to let this boil for a good 20 minutes. So now I'm going to turn that off and let this sit for another 10 minutes, just to kind of help it cool down and also to get all the flavors steeped a little bit longer. Now it's time to strain off the pieces, leaving us just the root beer liquid in our half gallon mason jar. Wow. I wish you guys could have smelled that while it was boiling. The whole house smells like root beer. Wow. This is incredible. I'm making a mess. So since this is still warm, we're going to make it easy on ourselves and add the sugar. So as soon as we add the sugar, it'll dissolve a lot easier than if the water was cold. Exactly. And for this recipe, we really want about one cup of sugar. And today we're going to be using a mixture of three fourths a cup of the and also a fourth a cup of molasses. Add additional color. And also I just love the flavor of molasses. Look how dark it is already. Once we add that molasses, it's going to get even darker. So you just made brown sugar, didn't you? Actually? Yes. That's how you make brown sugar, guys. You could just add molasses to rocking sugar. Oh my gosh. From here, we really need to cool this down because the next step we're putting in our living ingredients. So we could just leave this sitting for a few hours. We want to cool it to room temperature. We could also put it in the refrigerator, but I think they're really speeded up very quickly. We are going to immerse this in an ice bath. What we like to do in our sink, we put a big pot, we add a ton of ice and a bunch of water, and then we put a top on this. And immerse it and it cools down very quickly. And occasionally we're going to open the top and stir it up to get all of the liquid hot and cool dissipated. It'll cool it down a lot faster. And then just to make sure we don't get any kind of chlorinated water in the jar, we're just going to put a top back on it. Once it's completely cooled, either to room temperature or even a little cooler, then it's time to add a starter culture. By boiling this, we've actually killed off all of the bacteria and yeast. So now since we have so much fuel in here and all the sugar, we need something to eat all of that sugar. And that's going to get the fermentation process started. And there's actually quite a few different starter cultures that you can use. First of all, you could use whey, but I want to mention since we don't eat dairy, there are lots of other varieties that you can use. You can use water kefir, you could use yeast, you could use even a previous batch of root beer that you've already made, that you've already fermented, but we don't have any previous batches. So we're going to be using our ginger bug. We fed it not that long ago, but I think it should still be really hungry to eat all the sugars in this half gallon. Isn't that amazing? You can make root beer or ginger ale with the same thing. That is so cool. There's so many things you can make with this ginger bug. And if you want to know how to create a ginger bug starter culture from scratch for yourself, either for this recipe or for something else, we're going to put a link in the description below. And we're also going to put a link here at the end of this video so that you can go right to it. And we're going to be using a half cup of ginger bug for our half gallon of root beer. So you definitely want to stir your ginger bug. It wasn't cloudy before, and then it became cloudy because all of the good bacteria is now all distributed throughout the liquid. So when you pull out just the liquid, you want all the good stuff to come with it. That's the secret guys. That stuff is alive and it's going to make this whole thing alive. I'm going to put away this ginger bug for our future use. Our very last ingredient before we start the fermentation process is vanilla extract. It adds a really good vanilla flavor. And if you want to be pretty fancy, you could even use the vanilla beans during the boiling process. But it's so expensive. So really, if you wanted to leave this out, you definitely could. We just love to include it because it adds kind of like a cream soda flavor to your root beer. Yeah, if you think about the last time you had a nice big gulp of root beer, you probably thought of a little bit of vanilla in there. So I think it adds something special. So we want to use one to two teaspoons of our vanilla extract. Like we mentioned before, we need to add a little bit more non-chlorinated water to this up to about one inch below the top. Gives enough room for all of the foam that's going to happen. This gets pretty active. Now we just need to give this one last stir before we put a lid on it. Oh yeah. And some of our favorite lids are actually these fermentation lids. I know you've heard us talk about them before, but they're basically silicone and they have a little bit of a hole on top. That way, as the fermentation process happens and the bacteria is eating the sugar, you're going to get a little bit of off-gassing, carbonation essentially, and it needs to go somewhere. So that's what the fermentation lid is going to help you with. It also allows no oxygen to get in, so you won't have any problems. As always, we'll put a link to all of our favorite fermenting gears, such as the silicone fermentation lids, in the description below. And you'll also be able to find them, as always, on our website at fermentationadventure.com. Typically, we like to let this ferment for anywhere from two to four days, but we are going to follow this every day, so you know what to expect when you're making this at home. After 24 hours, it looks the same and we're not seeing any bubbles yet. But just a handful of hours later, we're starting to see some fermentation activity. There's a light layer of foam on top. There's no need to give it a stir, but we're going to anyway, just so we can see all the fizzy bubbles that are starting to appear. After two full days, there's a steady stream of bubble activity. It's alive! We also see some healthy sediment on the bottom, which is not only the spices sinking, but also a white layer of healthy byproduct of the fermentation process. Taking a look inside, we see a nice brown color and a light foam layer. We have a side-by-side comparison now. We have a freshly made batch right here, and this one has been fermenting for two and a half days. Let's take a look. This is the same exact recipe, and look at that difference. It definitely loses its color, but that's because a lot of the color is actually sitting at the bottom in the sediment, so things have like really settled to the bottom. Now on top of that, if you look really close, it is bubbling away like crazy. Wow! Hey, it actually looks like a ruby already. Yeah, it does. Okay, so it smells good. The color looks good. I bet it would taste really good right now too. And I'm really looking forward to it, but we have one more step that's really going to give it that foam that you're looking for when you pour that nice root beer. We want to pressurize this into soda bottles. I think we should give this a stir and get it into those beer bottles. Oh, whoa! The foam! Whoa! Wow, that was incredible. So we're going to bottle these into four bottles. I think we mentioned that before, but we have three glass bottles and one tester bottle. And again, it's very important to use a tester bottle because as you're able to squeeze this, you can figure out how much pressure is building in these glass bottles. You can see how active that was too, so this is really important. You don't want any exploding glass bottles on you. And when you put it into these bottles, it's still going to bubble away and create carbonation, which is what we want. Just don't let it go too far. Be very, very careful when using glass bottles. One of the tools we've really loved and discovered this year is actually these little fermentation tops. They screw right on. They are leak-proof, so that's going to help us tremendously in not making a mess. I'm going to give it a last stir. Now that's nice. Okay, here we go. The key here though is to pour them all around the same line, so you have the same amount of headspace on all your bottles. Now we're just going to cap these so we can start building the pressure. And what we're going to do is basically check frequently our tester bottle to make sure that it's not building too quickly, and as soon as that pressure is a good solid squeeze, pressure squeeze, then we're going to be ready to drink our root beer. Oh my gosh, it's still hard. Yeah, really? After 12 hours, our tester bottle was already starting to feel solid, so we gave it another four hours and decided it was time to burp the bottles. That way we could let it ferment a little longer. There was so much carbonation. It has been 24 hours and we have tested the pressure and it's pretty solid. We are ready to open it. There is no give on this tester bottle. We better be really careful when opening this bottle. It's going to probably have a lot of pressure. If we're not careful, we might have root beer on the ceiling. But be careful at home. Yours could be super carbonated and might need you to kind of test it, open and close it, open and close it a few times. Whoa. Should I do it? We made root beer. Oh man. Look at that. Cheers. Cheers. Root beer. Oh wow. I can't believe it. I taste a little bit of the bitterness. I definitely taste the wintergreen, the licorice. Oh yeah. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Root beer float. Coconut milk vanilla ice cream. I found straws. This is insane. That is so good. You could cry. Oh my god. I gotta see what she's talking about. Look at that. Oh my god. That looks amazing. It's incredible. Whoa. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Now that is what I'm talking about. That's awesome. You guys are going to love this recipe. If you like this video, give us a like. Don't forget to subscribe and share this with your friends because they are going to be impressed by this root beer. And get out there and create some culture. To root beer. Cheers. Whoa.