Root Beer Recipe

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Curtis2010

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As requested, I am posting this recipe on it's own thread:

Originally Posted by Curtis2010

I just brewed an awesome root beer and thought I would post here for the benefit of those looking for a good recipe. This is for 5 gallons for forced carbonated root beer (you could of course easily adapt this to naturally carbonate).

The end result has a rich creamy head with very long retention, creamy mouth feel, and is not overly sweet as can result if using sugar rather than DME.

Ingredients below:

8oz Cara-Pils
8oz Flaked Oats
1lb Light DME
1 Bottle Root Beer Extract (qty may vary by supplier)
1/2 tsp Vanilla

Brew Steps:

Bring 1 gallon of water to 160 and add grains (I put mine in a grain bag which makes them easy to remove). Steep at 155 for 30 minutes (do not boil). Remove grains.

Add DME and mix well. Bring water back up to 160 and hold for 30 minutes (there is no need to boil this stuff...just need to pasteurize and mix well).

Transfer to keg (our whatever your gear dictates) add extract (again no need to boil an extract you just drive off flavor components). Top up with with cool clean water. Force carbonate at approximately 26PSI at 45F.

Pic attached of the end result -- rich, creamy and yummy!

You could also adapt this to brew a "hard" root beer by upping the gravity with DME. I have a small 1-liter test batch of this approach brewing now. I brought the OG of this test batch up to about 1.060 with DME and pitched a generic dry brewer's yeast by Coopers.

Guate Root Beer 2011-12-23 SAM_1197.jpg
 
So would you add priming sugar to the root beer and bottle like beer if you don't wish to force carbonate? Thanks in advance.
 
Yes, you should be able to mix in appropriate amount of priming sugar and yeast to naturally carbonate.

For naturally carbonating root beers I prefer to use large plastic soda bottles so I can bleed off any excess pressure easily.

Also, I added a pic to my original post above (forgot it when I re-posted here). Note there is condensation on the mug so the representation of clarity suffers a bit (clarity is actually better than it looks).

Let me know how it works out.
 
Cool. The kids have been going to the brew store with me and decided they want to make some root beer. Hoping to do some next weekend. Thanks for the recipe.
 
What is the serving pressure you are using, is it the 26 PSI you do for force carbing? I force carb my beer at serving pressure and just leave for about 10-14 days so I was wondering if this could be the same?
 
So would you add priming sugar to the root beer and bottle like beer if you don't wish to force carbonate? Thanks in advance.

You will need to refrigerate to stop the yeast if you naturally carbonate. Otherwise the pressure will build enough to make a bomb out of it. You will want to use plastic to brew in so you can feel the pressure to gauge when they need to go in the fridge. You want them HARD. Like, seltzer water hard.
 
What is the serving pressure you are using, is it the 26 PSI you do for force carbing? I force carb my beer at serving pressure and just leave for about 10-14 days so I was wondering if this could be the same?

A few months late, but here´s the reply. The 26PSI (at about 65F as I recall) is just for the initial carbonation. Lower pressures for serving (26PSI would likely make a foamy mess).

I usually transfer mine over to 1 liter flip-top bottles and put a few in the fridge. Transfer using my home-made bottle filler -- dead easy to make and use (mine is a quick disconnect fitting to hose to valve to long hose to insert in bottle -- plenty of posts here on a variety of ways to make these -- commercial versions available too).
 
Im sorry, but I dont see how one lb of DME is anywhere close to sweet enough for 5 gallons? Am I missing somehting?
 
It's a 1 gallon batch. I do wonder what bottle of rootbeer extract is being used. I would assume that this is more like a McCormick extract, not a root beer concentrate designed for several gallons.
 
It's a 1 gallon batch. I do wonder what bottle of rootbeer extract is being used. I would assume that this is more like a McCormick extract, not a root beer concentrate designed for several gallons.

As would I. Are we talking the typical 4oz extract bottle like Rainbow, Gnome or Zaratains...etc?
 
He says It's a 5 gallon batch. Remember you're getting sugar from the lb of DME, the lb of grains, and the extract. Unlike fermented beer the sugar in te wort isn't eaten by yeast.
 
It's a 1 gallon batch. I do wonder what bottle of rootbeer extract is being used. I would assume that this is more like a McCormick extract, not a root beer concentrate designed for several gallons.

Nope. It's a 5-gallon batch (1 gallon "boil" topped up with water in the keg), but keep in mind this is "soda" not "beer". You don't need all those sugars for fermentation because there is none.

I've tried a few different brands of extract, comes down to personal taste preference, I think that "Gnome" was the last one I used.
 
Im sorry, but I dont see how one lb of DME is anywhere close to sweet enough for 5 gallons? Am I missing somehting?

This recipe is relatively "dry" so to speak -- which suits my personal taste. Personally I like the malty sweetness of DME combined with the root beer taste. DME and/or sugars could be varied to suit your taste.

The DME and the grains help give it a richer mouth feel and help with head retention. Sugars won't add body, but will increase sweetness.

DME won't give you a sugary sweetness (more of a malty sweetness like in beer).

Since this is a soda recipe, not intended to be fermented, you could just modify as you wish to suite your taste -- no concern about the OG.
 
Just realized I did a pound of oats and a pound of carapils. Well, we'll see how this goes!
 
Let us know... We ha ve been discussing this recipe on the gf forum... Our thoughts were that the srm was too light for rootbeer, carapils should help... We also bumped the oats to 1# to counteract the rice we used for the dme...
 
I ended up back sweetening with 1/2 lb brown sugar and 1/2 lb table sugar (it's what I had in the pantry) don't know much about root beer srms, but it sure looked plenty dark in the sample I drew. I've got it carbing away at 26psi now. I believe with the lb of oats it should have a nice creamy mouthfeel and good thick head.
 
If you are not force carbing but doing it in bottles using yeast, arent you the getting fermentation? Is it so insignificant it wont matter (i.e. I will brew this for my kids) or is it just simpler to do tablets in the bottles? Also, 5 gallons is a LOT of root beer, if I wanted to scale it to a 1 gallon batch, what do you think? Just do 1/5 ingredients?
 
You are correct that with bottle conditioning the yeast give off both carbonation & fermentation... My understanding is that we are not letting it ferment fully... When i plugged it into brewR its only estimating 1.6% potential so i would guess maybe as high as .5%... Needles to say, just to be safe this will be a no go at work :)
 
You're going to get even less fermentation than that. It doesn't add any significant abv to bottle condition.

I'm getting a very cloudy rootbeer. It's been carbing in the kegerator for 3 days now. I'm hoping some rest time will allow for clarifying. Definitely won't use that much flaked oats again.
 
...Our thoughts were that the srm was too light for rootbeer, carapils should help...

Don't know the stylistically correct SRM for root beer either, but root beer extracts are intensely dark. The 5 gallon batch I originally brewed using this recipe had nothing else significantly dark in it except the root beer extract. And as you can see from the originally post pic it is easily as dark as a Stout beer.

The other ingredients all have low SRM potential:

Carapils (2.0 SRM)
Flaked Oats (1.0 SRM)
DME Light (8.0 SRM)
 
You will have no problem at all with it being dark enough. This stuff is dark as I could ever imagine. Quite tasty too.
 
I think i missed the pic... That does look good... I was going off what my app said for srm (like 4 or 5) but i think it was counting the rb extract as 1 or 2 srm... Really looking forward to making the gf version of this one...
 
If you dont have a kegging system to force carbonate the soda, you have to use yeast to do it naturally... In making beer when you add yeast they eat the sugar and produce co2 and alcohol... Theres not much alcohol in the soda because the fermentable levels are down & we dont leave it under fermetation very long before putting the sodas in the fridge and stopping the process...
 
I think i missed the pic... That does look good... I was going off what my app said for srm (like 4 or 5) but i think it was counting the rb extract as 1 or 2 srm... Really looking forward to making the gf version of this one...

If you put it in a brewing app then, since you don't know the SRM potential of the extract, it's not going to get it right. Just the SRM values for the other components should give you a 4-5 SRM (very light color). Given that a few oz of this stuff will turn 5 gallons almost black the SRM potential must be huge. Be interesting to ask a manufacturer if they have any idea.
 
...
I'm getting a very cloudy rootbeer. It's been carbing in the kegerator for 3 days now. I'm hoping some rest time will allow for clarifying. Definitely won't use that much flaked oats again.

Flaked Oats. BeerSmith recommends that the grain bill contain no more than 30% flaked oats. The 8oz I originally used in this recipe comes out to 25%. So, 1lb is going to be a bit excessive...lots of body though...even chewy maybe! : )

Carapils. BeerSmith recommends no more than 20% of grain bill for Carapils. The 8oz in my originally recipe comes out slightly high at 25%. I got tired of fiddling w/ amounts to get them exact so just rounded up to 8oz. Did not notice any negative effect. Carapils is just in there to help with head retention so you don't need much.
 
I think i missed the pic... That does look good... I was going off what my app said for srm (like 4 or 5) but i think it was counting the rb extract as 1 or 2 srm... Really looking forward to making the gf version of this one...

What is the "gf version" and "gf forum" I see referenced in this thread? "Gluten Free"?
 
Curtis, yes gf is gluten free... SWMBO was diagnosed with Celiacs last November so cannot have the proteins in wheat, barley, rye etc... Needless to say its a PIA, but makes it very interesting at the same time...
 
Sorry to hear about her condition -- certainly makes brewing a challenge in expect.

I get the occasional charter guest who is gluten intolerant.
 
robbyhicks said:
If you dont have a kegging system to force carbonate the soda, you have to use yeast to do it naturally... In making beer when you add yeast they eat the sugar and produce co2 and alcohol... Theres not much alcohol in the soda because the fermentable levels are down & we dont leave it under fermetation very long before putting the sodas in the fridge and stopping the process...

Just to be clear, the yeast are only to carb the bottles but if you keg you don't need the yeast. Is that right?
 
Can I just cut this recipe in half to scale it? And I'm using bread yeast to carb -- how much?
 
Can I just cut this recipe in half to scale it?...

With a soda since you are not worried about things like mash efficiency you should just be able o scale it by simple division.
 
Brewed sunday afternoon, 2.5 just scaled in halfusing the gluten free ingredients... Went to freezer/cooler this afternoon, bottles were nice & hard... The gravity sample we took on sunday was a little weak, we will see how it is carbed up... Used 1 or 2 tsp of nottingham dry yeast and 4oz of cane sugar for carbbing... I will crack one this evening after softball...
 
robbyhicks said:
...Used 1 or 2 tsp of nottingham dry yeast and 4oz of cane sugar for carbbing... I will crack one this evening after softball...

How did it turn out?
 
Brewed 5 gallons of this, tasted it and it was not near sweet enough for me. I added 2lbs dark brown sugar(boiled it first in a little water). and after stupidly adding hot liquid to cold carbonated cold liquid watched as I lost about liter on the garage floor before I could get the lid back on.

4 hours later it's much better tasting and I think it will be steller when fully carbed

Speaking of which how long will it take to carb at 26psi 40f?
 
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