Alcohol in my root beer???

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thantos

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Hi all,
I just read another post where someone said they did not want to use yeast in the making of their Root Beer, to avoid it having Alcohol! I just made my first batch for my son using red star champagne yeast. Will this produce Alcohol and if so to what level? I do not want my son and his friends running around getting ripped off my root beer. LOL.... I didn't take any Hydro readings as I was not expecting and alcohol.
Thanks Gene
 
The yeast added at the end for bottling will produce a very tiny bit of alcohol, and also produce CO2. This CO2 is what carbonates the root beer. The amount of alcohol produced is not even measurable with a brewing hydrometer. Trust me...I tried :D.
 
The guy at my LHBS said that homemade root beer has less alcohol then orange juice. Can anyone confirm this?
 
I can't confirm that OJ has alcohol, but I can confirm that you'll get sick from the sugary sweetness of root beer long before you'll get drunk. RDWHARB!
 
Technically, water has alcohol in it. It's just a matter of whether you can metabolize it before you maximize the volume you can drink. I was bored doing research in college once and calculated how much water you'd have to drink to get drunk. Too much.
 
Most commercial flavors are ethanol based. It's been a while since I have done beverage work, so I can't quite remember what the commercial limit for EtOH in a soft drink is. I think it is somewhere ~0.1-0.2%.



How does that work?

Water is H20, which is composed mostly of two hydrogens bound to one oxygen molecule. However, these bonds constantly break and reform, leaving a certain number of OH- molecules in water (alcohol groups). However, the number of these is extremely low.
 
Water is H20, which is composed mostly of two hydrogens bound to one oxygen molecule. However, these bonds constantly break and reform, leaving a certain number of OH- molecules in water (alcohol groups). However, the number of these is extremely low.
:off:
OH- groups are hydroxides, not alcohol, you cannot ever get drunk off water....you're not a chemist are you? :cross:

From Wiki, "In chemistry, an alcohol is any organic compound in which a hydroxyl group (-OH) is bound to a carbon atom of an alkyl or substituted alkyl group. "
 
Technically, water has alcohol in it.

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. "Water" is a pretty general term but as a rule pure water would be simply H2O.

Ethanol on the other hand is C2H5OH. Since water does not contain carbon, it can never and will never be alcohol in the sense that beer/wine/liqueur have alcohol in them unless something is added to it rendering it no longer "water" but a solution of water and something else.

That said- most water does have various impurities such as minerals and salts so there could theoretically be minuscule traces of ethanol compounds in some water supplies.

Water:
Agua.png


Alcohol:
alcohol_chemical_formula_postcard-p239653135727266692trdg_400.jpg
 
Water is H20, which is composed mostly of two hydrogens bound to one oxygen molecule. However, these bonds constantly break and reform, leaving a certain number of OH- molecules in water (alcohol groups). However, the number of these is extremely low.

Trace amounts of all kinds of stuff. Nothing keeps it out, so it's in there. Heisenberg's uncertainty principal - well maybe that's going a tad far.

There's a place up in Michigan that had a dangerous amount of methane in the well water. My brother-in-law had to devise a separator to insure it was all extracted before it got into the basement and either:

A) Blew up the house at the first spark,

or

B) Suffocated the occupants.
 
This thread sort of went off on a tangent so I'm going to try bring it back.
My son and I just made a case of cola from an extract kit I got from my homebrew supplier. I used Red Star champagne yeast also and bottled in glass beer bottles. It's been carbonating for a few weeks and is getting pretty fizzy. No bottle bombs-yet. The flavor is pretty good, not Coke but not bad but it does have a sharp maybe alcohol taste. It may be my mind thinking that there is alcohol in it - I don't know. Just looking for more reassurance that this drink is safe for my 10 yr old. I hate to think that 20 years from now he'll be on a corner with a brown bag cause I made homemade cola with him. OK that might be extreme but I'm sure all the dads know what I mean.
 
...Check out Vick's Formula 44D....

I made a few batches and it's not at all noticeable. A quarter of a percent ,huh?

If it would take me two 16 oz. bottles of regular comercial beer to get right on the lower fringe of noticing anything..... 3.2 percent? I'm 240lbs.

So say a 80lb kid. 3.2/.25 ratio. Almost thirteen as many bottles homemade rootbeer as I would have to drink regular beer at an equal weight - take a third for their weight - they would have to drink 4 times as many bottles as me to get to the bottom edge of noticing anything.

Hey this is a word problem! :)

Would they drink eight bottles to even notice a little bit? I think the sugar would make them metablize the alcohol pretty fast too.

New house rule No more than seven homemade rootbeers at a sitting.

;-)
 
"New house rule No more than seven homemade rootbeers at a sitting. "


Haha, that's pretty good. I bought some root beer extract today to make with my son tonight.
 
the only way for your boy to get a buzz off the root beer is to drink all 5 gallions of the root beer in 2 hours.
 
For hundreds of years low alcohol beer was consumed by everyone (children included) as a source of food and hydration. Plain water wasn't safe back then in populated areas so it was a primary drink.

Strong stout beers were originally used as a source of nutrition for breast feeding mothers.

The kids will be fine, even at 1 or 2 percent (about 10x what it is).
 
I hate to think that 20 years from now he'll be on a corner with a brown bag cause I made homemade cola with him. OK that might be extreme but I'm sure all the dads know what I mean.

I tried my first taste of beer at 5 years old. Didn't like it, probably didn't help that my dad likes to drink some real swill because it's cheap...

At 10 years old, my dad pulled me aside and told me:

"My son, some day you're going to be tempted to drink. That's alright, there is nothing wrong with it. But you need to remember a couple of ground rules:

1. Drink at home, where it's safe. The beer is in the fridge.
2. I'm not buying for your friends.

and 3... "(this is where he leaned in close)

"NEVER take the last one!"
 
Hi guys,

I need your opinion. Based on what you guys are saying, there really is no fear of getting drunk off of homemade rootbeer, so long as the correct yeast is used (Red Champange Yeast i think someone said). My brother was an alcoholic, and has been 7 months sober (woo hoo!). When i found out he was an alcoholic it killed me because I used to love to share my homebrews with him, as he and I bonded over that in a way. So i was wondering if you think brewing rootbeer would be an acceptable replacement for a previous alcoholic? I will most certainly ask him and his wife about it too, but to get a consensus from you guys would be awesome too.

Thanks!
 
If I get it right, You use a small amount of yeast and it stops the fermentation and leaves enough/most of the sugar for sweetness.

There should not be enough alcohol to even notice.

Is it going bother him working with a process which could make alcohol easily under just slightly different circumstances?
 
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