Soft Soda Souring?

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MichiganMan

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So I recently tried my Second Batch of Soft Root Beer, I used Red star champagne yeast and rainbow flavors Root beer extract. For the first batch I used bread yeast. With both this batch and the first one they both tasted like a Cola with a Sour taste, and a root beer after taste. My Brother thought it tasted kind of sweet. Why does it taste sour (or sweet) Am I doing something wrong?
 
it could be the yeast. You can use regular ale yeast to do this also. Safeale comes to mind. I force carb my root beer thru my kegging system, so my guess would be that, it was the yeast. I've tried the rainbow root beer flavor (its not great but its good enough I guess) a sour taste may be a slight infection.. or the yeast is the culprit.
 
When i carb my rootbeer I find that I have better results using
1) glass bottles
and
2) champagne yeast

FWIW and YMMV the champagne yeast seems to lend itself to a more crisp flavour. The glass bottles have recently become a personal preference. I cheaped out when I first started and used the PETN bottles. A friend and I bottled out of the same batch; he used glass and I used the plastic. His tasted completely different than mine (better in my opinion) and since then I've been sold.

As for the extracts....I don't think there are any that are going to give you the "pure" rootbeer flavour experience that you are going to see from like Barks or even hires/a&W....at least not that I've found. If you have an extract that comes close to that I'd love to hear about it and try it.

KingPin
 
KingPin said:
When i carb my rootbeer I find that I have better results using
1) glass bottles
and
2) champagne yeast

FWIW and YMMV the champagne yeast seems to lend itself to a more crisp flavour. The glass bottles have recently become a personal preference. I cheaped out when I first started and used the PETN bottles. A friend and I bottled out of the same batch; he used glass and I used the plastic. His tasted completely different than mine (better in my opinion) and since then I've been sold.

As for the extracts....I don't think there are any that are going to give you the "pure" rootbeer flavour experience that you are going to see from like Barks or even hires/a&W....at least not that I've found. If you have an extract that comes close to that I'd love to hear about it and try it.

KingPin
Click to expand...


How do you tell when the soda is carbonated enough with glass bottles? Also Where did you get them and do you re-use them?
 
Really good questions; I haven't mastered the art of telling when the glass is fully carbonated as of yet; So I still tend to do one in the plastic bottle. I figure once that one is hard I will chill them all this has been typically 2-3 days for me (maybe my house is cooler?)

the glass bottles I picked up at a local home brew store and I found a couple of growlers online through kijiji.

And Yes I do reuse the bottles. Rinse them out once i'm done the drink and then sterilize as normal before use.

happy hunting.
 

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