Root Beer Fountain

[JJinMD]

So I have a couple of years brewing experience under my belt and decided to dabble in sodas for a change. Last week, put together a root beer from combining a few different recipes. Anyway, after boiling, cooling, and diluting, I determined that my final product was way too sweet. It seemed like a lost cause and I really didn't want to waste additional ingredients trying to save it (this root beer was way more expensive than most beers I have made). So I decided to let my little saccharomyces friends solve my problem and I added them (voss kveik) to my 2 gallon test run (kegged in a 2.5 gallon corny) to ferment under pressure (and hopefully save me some CO2). I had successfully fermented under pressure with a hard seltzer I had made a few weeks back so it seemed like a good idea. Once or twice a day I would release the pressure with the keg's prv. Then when it seemed like it had fizzled out, I left it for a few days to fully carb up. About an hour ago, I moved it from inside the house to the garage to cold crash and sample. I hooked a picnic tap up to it and it started gushing out the tap like crazy, so I quickly disconnected the liquid connection, but the poppet got stuck on what I think must have been some trub or a chunk of root that got past my filtering. Anyway, it was spurting all over the place through the poppet, so I pulled the prv to try to get it to stop and it just kept gushing and gushing and then, of course, started gushing out of the prv. So I opened up the garage door, ran it outside where it continued the root beer fountain through the poppet for what seemed like forever. When it finally started to die down, I pulled the prv again and was able to take off the liquid post to inspect the poppet. I cleaned it out, sanitized it, and put it back on. Rinsed off the keg and now it is sitting in a tub of ice. But unfortunately I am staring at a huge mess in the garage, there are droplets of root beer everywhere. I had a gusher a few years ago when I first tried fermenting apple cider, but nothing like this!

In the future I will be more diligent about using a spunding valve. I never should have let the keg build up so much pressure, I really thought the yeasties were winding down, but it seems they were just getting started!

 

[mrlatj]

But how does it taste?

 

[JJinMD]

But how does it taste?

Right? Pretty good, I thought I would have to back-sweeten, but it still has some unfermented sugar in there... so I am going to just let it be. I did end up adding some root beer extract to the otherwise natural brew, but really just for color and a little more flavor. This keg is going to a party this afternoon, so the previously pale color would probably turn people off and I don't really feel like explaining why the whole time, so I darkened it up with the extract. I think it tastes pretty good, and thought it fine as is though. It's a work party, and the crowd is mostly into hard seltzer and BMC, so 5g of seltzer, 5g of scherlenka's miller lite clone (a bit adjusted from original recipe), 5g of Sam Adam's Summer Ale Clone and 5g of Blue Moon Clone. Lower abv and lighter styles should fit with the high summer temps today I think! It will be interesting to see which kicks first. Lots of ladies watching summer figures, so my guess is the seltzer.