As Chrissy says this natural homemade rootbeer is a foamy bastard from hell. A fiendish herbalist. A monstrous blast of absurd brown bitter brew. I might be taking liberties with her exact words, but I’m confident she’ll forgive me because it really is a strange brew that challenges one’s understanding of fluid dynamics and fizz.
In any case, a delicious and refreshing rootbeer is well within your grasp if that’s you’re thing. It’s essentially the same as the Ginger Beer we made a few weeks back:
- Ginger Bug
- Boiled Herbal syrup
- Cool, Mix, Strain, Bottle
- Secondary Ferment
- Refrigerate
- Enjoy!
You’ll see here the constituent parts of the rootbeer brew. Lots of spices and dried herbs that Chrissy spent no small part of the day tracking down. Sassafras and Sarsaparilla! Apparently there is a global shortage of wintergreen so there was some replacement, and we skipped the coriander, but otherwise we followed this recipe for (natural homemade) rootbeer.
Overall I’m very pleased with the result – though I do find it overpotent! In the future I’ll happily double or triple the amount of syrup to the same amount of herbs.
We cooled the herbal mixture with the wort chiller we made for the purpose – hooked up to the kitchen sink it cooled the syrup from a boil to room temperature in just a few minutes. If I were to increase the volume of the brew this wort chiller would come in very handy for cooling the larger volume of hot liquid (the waiting for which often means the brewing and bottling requires a free day instead of an evening).
It takes a good 10 minutes to open a bottle of this natural homemade rootbeer as roaps of thick foam spew unavoidably all over the place (yup I get it, har-dee-har-har, how droll).