Old family root beer recipe

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This recipe has been in the family for over 50 years. Wine making is an old family tradition, but I had no idea my Great Grandparents were into homemade soda until my Dad talked about it during a recent visit. He said he'd get the recipe from my Grandmother. I was excited to see the recipe, since he was sure it was "from scratch," and he remembered it being very tasty. I'm a little disappointed, but I thought I'd share, anyway:

rootbeergj9.png


Dad also remembered an old bench capper they used to bottle the stuff. He mentioned that it might still be around someplace. At this point, I'm more excited about a big old cast iron capper than the extract recipe above.
 
Yuri, that's awesome! I can remember secret family recipes from when I was a kid, too, and I later found out that my mom's "secret BBQ sauce" was bought from the Dairy Queen!

I love that your recipe mentions that the directions are on the box. That's classic!
 
Similar thing happened to me, we have been trying to get my wifes grandfathers root beer recipe for months, and finally decided to make up some from a couple of different recipes I found on line. At the family outing I pored a glass for her grandpa and asked him what I was missing, he asked me what extract I used. I found out he used to use hires also. ;) Must be good stuff.
 
This is an old thread, but if you guys are interested in trying root beer recipes from scratch, there are a few options. Stephen Cresswell has a book on making root beer and other drinks, which is a great resource but it's mostly a really old style of making root beer, the way your grandparents would've tasted it but pretty different than tasting like A&W or Dad's.

There are a few sites online that have some modern root beer recipes, like http://www.rootbeerbrewer.com. I've gotten varied results, and am still trying to perfect my recipes. Nothing I find seems to be quite right though.
 
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