Making rootbeer with alchohol

Hi everyone,

Been home brewing for years now. Just came acrossed your forum. Some really great info here. When I first started, which doesn't feel that long ago, there weren't any brewing forums online. So what I am trying to do here is duplicate a root beer made at a small brewery here in Illinois. It is 10% ABV.

My experiment here is going to be fermenting a wort of just corn sugar with champagne yeast. After fermentation I plan to add the syrup and back sweeten it with maltodextrin.

I am wondering how much sugar I need to make a one gallon test batch. I calculated 2.75 pounds to get me to 12% ABV, with 1.3 gallons to start and a fifteen minute boil. Am I on the right track with the calculator? Using Brewpal on the iPhone and the settings aren't super clear for using only sugar. Thanks.

I'm sure this idea has been tried, so any input is welcomed.

Handy chart here which matches SG with amount of granulated sugar to add: http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/hydrom.asp

Sounds interesting. Please let us know how it turns out.

I assume you are talking about Small Town Brewery. I haven't had any of their stuff yet, but am very intrigued by the idea of their hard root beer. According to their website, their non-alcoholic root beer is brewed like a regular beer and gets all of its sugars from grain, it would stand to reason that the hard root beer is also all grain.

I have heard that it may be a malt liquor they are using. How would one go about brewing malt liquor for this? Every post I come acrossed talks about how it would be cheaper to just buy malt liquor.

On a side note, I tried Sprecher's new hard root beer, took a few sips and poured it down the drain.

Anyone try something like this? Sounds interesting.

http://byo.com/soda-pop/item/1299-real-root-beer

From a really old issue of BYO.