Hello all! I hope someone here can help me with my root beer woes. I'm totally new to this, so I'm probably doing something very wrong.
I'm experimenting with making my own root beer from scratch. I've used premade extracts which went okay, but I want to be able to tweak my own flavour. Unfortunately, though, my early attempts are going horribly awry.
First, my setup. My approach is to essentially steep the ingredients as you would a tea, and then I add sweetener (I'm experimenting with both regular sugars as well as artificial sweeteners), and then I put them into a small carbonatation device I have. My carbonator (is that a word?) makes a little less than a litre at a time, using a small CO2 cartridge.
I've accumulated a whole bunch of organic and raw (well, dried) ingredients, including nutmeg, cinnamon, junniper berries, vanilla beans, star anise, and whole cloves. But those are merely the supporting cast.
Where I think I'm falling down is in the main ingredient. I live in Japan, and it is hard to get either sasparilla or sassafrass here. Amazon and other online sellers won't ship here, I guess because of some kind of import restrictions.
I saw a recipe on these forums that used licorice root, which i can get here, so I gave that a whirl, and it tasted like old compost. It was disgusting.
After hard searching, I found dried sassafrass leaves and wintergreen leaves. The resulting brew tasted like not much of anything.
Eventually, I was able to find a local supplier who sold "sassafrass root bark", and I just finished making a batch, and it tastes like wet tree bark. I mean, I've never licked a tree, but it smells and tastes pretty much what I imagine it would be like to cut a branch off any old tree and boil it in water.
I'm scratching my head here, because online recipes make it seem so much easier than this. They seem to just boil stuff up and carbonate it and go. When i finally got the sassafrass root bark, i thought I finally got my hands on the real deal. Is this not the right stuff? I first thought the licorice root might be a bad batch, or maybe the idea of licorice root is just wrong, but now that the sassafrass root bark was also disappointing, I'm wondering if my process is what's at fault.
Basically my recipe right now is to take about four or five tablespoons (or more) of the root bark, boil it in a little over a litre of water, add in small amounts of the other ingredients to see if I can tease out a flavour (I taste test as I go), and let it steep for about 20 minutes to half an hour. I add sweetener while the brew is still warm, but then I have to chill it for a while before putting it in the carbonator. Sometimes I'll add a little more sweetener just before carbonation. This process is something I pieced together after reading many online recipes and adapting them to the resources I have.
Am I doing something wildly wrong? Do I just not have the right base ingredients yet?
Why does my root beer taste so lousy?
I'm experimenting with making my own root beer from scratch. I've used premade extracts which went okay, but I want to be able to tweak my own flavour. Unfortunately, though, my early attempts are going horribly awry.
First, my setup. My approach is to essentially steep the ingredients as you would a tea, and then I add sweetener (I'm experimenting with both regular sugars as well as artificial sweeteners), and then I put them into a small carbonatation device I have. My carbonator (is that a word?) makes a little less than a litre at a time, using a small CO2 cartridge.
I've accumulated a whole bunch of organic and raw (well, dried) ingredients, including nutmeg, cinnamon, junniper berries, vanilla beans, star anise, and whole cloves. But those are merely the supporting cast.
Where I think I'm falling down is in the main ingredient. I live in Japan, and it is hard to get either sasparilla or sassafrass here. Amazon and other online sellers won't ship here, I guess because of some kind of import restrictions.
I saw a recipe on these forums that used licorice root, which i can get here, so I gave that a whirl, and it tasted like old compost. It was disgusting.
After hard searching, I found dried sassafrass leaves and wintergreen leaves. The resulting brew tasted like not much of anything.
Eventually, I was able to find a local supplier who sold "sassafrass root bark", and I just finished making a batch, and it tastes like wet tree bark. I mean, I've never licked a tree, but it smells and tastes pretty much what I imagine it would be like to cut a branch off any old tree and boil it in water.
I'm scratching my head here, because online recipes make it seem so much easier than this. They seem to just boil stuff up and carbonate it and go. When i finally got the sassafrass root bark, i thought I finally got my hands on the real deal. Is this not the right stuff? I first thought the licorice root might be a bad batch, or maybe the idea of licorice root is just wrong, but now that the sassafrass root bark was also disappointing, I'm wondering if my process is what's at fault.
Basically my recipe right now is to take about four or five tablespoons (or more) of the root bark, boil it in a little over a litre of water, add in small amounts of the other ingredients to see if I can tease out a flavour (I taste test as I go), and let it steep for about 20 minutes to half an hour. I add sweetener while the brew is still warm, but then I have to chill it for a while before putting it in the carbonator. Sometimes I'll add a little more sweetener just before carbonation. This process is something I pieced together after reading many online recipes and adapting them to the resources I have.
Am I doing something wildly wrong? Do I just not have the right base ingredients yet?
Why does my root beer taste so lousy?
