WOW. A new Category.
 

I love soda. Matter of fact it was my quest to make root beer that lead me to my first home brew supply shop where I left with a $4.00 bottle of Root Beer extract.......and over a hundred dollars worth of brewing equipment.

Now my quest is for a root "Beer" Everyone says I can't and it won't be good and on and on and on....I'm about to just give it a whirl and see what happens.

I do also know that you WILL make a bottle bomb if you don't refridgerate your soda. I ALWAYS do a minimum of 1 in a plastic soda bottle so I can give it a squeeze and see how tight it's getting.

I've made root beer (well, my son says he has, but I sanitize, measure, add yeast, etc) and bottled it and kegged it. It's ok, and my son likes it.

I made some homemade ginger ale (the soda) that rocked, though! I really wish I could afford some of those 2.5 gallon cornes- 5 gallons of soda really is just too much.

We make a ginger ale with ginger root, sugar, and water. Turns out great! We make it as a syrup and dilute it with seltzer water as the need arises.

I hear you about keeping 5 gallons of it on hand. Why not dedicate a corny to seltzer water and just keep a liter or two of syrup in the fridge?

ya know yoop........you don't have to fill the corny all the way up..... ;)

Well, it's more the fridge space anyway! I have room for two kegs in my fridge. I don't think I can give up the space for soda. Maybe what I can do is keg it, and then bottle from the keg? Would the soda stay carbonated just as beer does? Then I could still have an occasional soda without giving up my fridge space.

One thing I like about homemade soda is that you can make it out of 100% natural ingredients- NO high fructose corn syrup. Yes, there is sugar, but I don't consider sugar something to be totally avoided.

The ginger ale had water, ginger, a lemon and sugar steeped into a syrup like sirhumpsalot said, and then water added and it was carbonated. It really was good and I might do it again.

I'd definately like to brew a batch of ginger ale or root beer. It'll be cool to start seeing some recipes pop up in here.

Maybe we need to add a 'Soda' category to the recipe database.........

Yoop, I don't see why using something like BM's counter pressure bottle filler wouldn't work for soda...it's worth a shot

Yeah, maybe try it with only a few bottles, just in case. I noticed that with my son's root beer, we kept it around 30 psi to carbonate and dispense, and I needed like 25 feet of line so it didn't foam. If I turned it down, it lost carbonation fast. I wasn't sure how that would work with the BMBF.

I was thinking that mashing some carapils might help the head retention (and carbonation retention) on a rootbeer. Just a random thought.

Me too...but I can't get over the thought of a Malt flavored Root Beer.