The Recipe
I followed, for the most part, the process outlined on the bottle of extract I used. The extract was Stoltzfus Root Beer Extract.
Ingredients
- 4oz Bottle of Stolzfus Root Beer Extract
- 8 Cups sugar (I used 7 cups of Florida cane sugar, and 1 cup of brown)
- 1/2 tsp yeast (I used Red Star ‘Premier Cuvee’)
- 5 gallons of luke-warm watter
Yield
About 5 gallons – which turned out to be around 53 beer bottles!
Process
- Mix sugar & yeast well (dry)
- Add 5 gal water to root beer extract, mixing well
- Bottle immediatly, filling to within 1/2 inch of the cap
- Place bottles in warm (70-80°F) area for 2 days
- After 2 days, keep chilled in fridge
Notes
- I boiled all the water used first, and had to let it cool to a luke-warm temp
- About 1/2 the bottles were not stored at a cold enough temperature, and I lost about 10 of those to over-carbonation and bottle bursting. The others I had to uncap, and recap in order to save them. The ones I recapped came out a little over-carbed still, but definitely drinkable!
- I used old 12oz glass beer bottles for the bottling. Definitely would be nice to have a better device than just a hose to fill each bottle.
Pictures and Progress!
Bottles being stored after sanitization:
Brewing being done! This is after I added the extract to the luke warm water:
And the bottled results (a few might be missing from the picture)
The results tasted really good, especially with some New York Vanilla. Mmmm.
Can’t wait to try a second batch, hopefully with more root-beer punch!