Root Beer Brewing - The Root Beer Person

Today’s guest post is all about research into brewing your own homemade root beer.

Hey all you amazing root beer peeps! I am The Root Beer Person’s significant other, Val! I’m the guest writer today with superior wit and unparalleled charm. If The Root Beer Person is a tenured root beer university professor steeped in knowledge and wisdom, I am but a humble undergraduate student trying to take a sip from that great mug of knowledge for one of my electives.

It’s nice to meet y’all!

I am not a usual root beer person, but part of being in a good relationship means that you share your root beer with your significant other–or else they’ll stage a hostile takeover of your intellectual property, and ruin your reputation. Okay, so maybe that won’t happen, but I do think that root beer is tasty and I do steal the occasional sip from my partner’s brew. If that’s not the basis for a great relationship, I don’t know what is.

So why am I even here?

Well to talk about the process of brewing your own sweet beverage, duh! Being the neophyte carbonated beverage enthusiast that I am, this is an exciting avenue to explore. Hopefully my research provides some insight into the beers themselves. Now, before I continue, be sure that when you’re brewing your own root beer, you take all of the safety steps you possibly can. You’re responsible for your own health!

Pros and Cons

Overall, I’ve found that brewers agree that being able to craft their own root beers allow for more interesting flavor than store bought alternatives. You’re in control of the recipe after all. You can also get your hands on fresher ingredients. If you’ve read The Root Beer Person’s posts, you know that this next one is a big deal. You can brew without additives, too much sugar, or weird food coloring!

The cons, however, are all about risk. There’s a risk of mess, risk of sickness, and a risk of over carbonation (which could result in explosions.) Obtaining sassafras root might make it difficult too, especially in America, since the FDA banned it from commercially made drinks for potential carcinogenic properties.

First step? Bottles. According to DybrnSoda’s video, we can use old glass bottles and re-cap them to carbonate and store our brews. Glass bottles do have a higher tendency to explode, but there’s definitely no chemical leeching like that found in plastic bottles. Cassie on Wholefully mentions that her and her family wrap the bottles in bubble wrap and check them often during the carbonation process to make sure that nothing goes awry. Flip-top bottles can release a bit of pressure, so those might be a worthwhile avenue too. Eric San Juan on Homebrew Supply mentions that it is important to keep your bottles refrigerated after you carbonate them in order to mitigate the risk of explosions and excessive alcohol content. There’s going to be a small amount of alcohol content. Generally speaking, you want to limit this.

Ingredients

It looks like the other ingredients you might need are unorthodox. Ale yeast (or baking yeast if you can’t find any,) sassafras root, sarsaparilla bark, and licorice root, are the most common ingredients that are difficult to find. Most of these affect that traditional root beer flavor, which means you can just straight up buy root beer extract if you don’t feel like making it from scratch. Mel’s Kitchen Café uses that in her recipe Jenny of Nourished Kitchen’s recipe, provides a really old-timey, folksy flavor, so you add dandelion root and wild juniper berries. Or even adding maraschino cherries like DybrnSoda did in his recipe. It all depends on your tastes, your preferences, and the spices available to you. The hardest part might just be figuring out what sort of taste you want!

Lastly, you will need time. Since root beer is historically an alcoholic beverage as Eric San Juan explained in his article, it needs to ferment. Don’t worry though, this doesn’t mean you’re doomed to make boozy root beer. It just means that you have to closely monitor your brew and ensure you don’t leave it to ferment too long! The general consensus that I found for non-alcoholic root beer is 2-7 days, depending on the heat of the area it is kept in and the type of yeast. Again, this is a question of taste and instinct rather than an exactly precise measurement. Just make sure they don’t explode!

Overall, making your own root beer is time-consuming but relatively easy. There are a myriad of recipes out there for you to try and experiment with, maybe I’ll even make some for The Root Beer Person to review! How cute would that be? If I do, I promise I’ll document this for him to share with you lovely root beer aficionados. For now, I’ll hand the controls right back to your favorite root beer overseer.

Val, signing out!

Lloyd M

I love this article, not huge on content, but huge on passion…just what I like about root beer. 😀 I’m a beer home brewer, dabbling in wines, but I’ve had a lifelong passion for root beer and love trying new ones. (We used to have The Root Beer Store a mile away in Lynnwood, WA; but, alas, it closed a year ago. Now it’s a tax-prep hole-in-the-wall place, definitely not something that sparks one’s passion for root beer. Sigh.)

So about exploding root beer… My mom used to make sodas, including root beer which, of course, exploded one day, starting with 1 bottle and quickly causing the rest to gang-fire explode in one hilariously funny moment, resulting is 4″ of root beer foam all over the family room floor. (It smelled wonderful, though!)

So, being a beer brewer… I do “pressure fermentation” which means fermenting beer in a container suitable for safely maintaining pressure up to 30 PSI, the max you’d ever want to use for beer, though 15 PSI is the typical sweet spot. For soda, some go as high as 60 PSI. (Yeah, bottle explosions under that much pressure will embed glass in your kitchen wall, for sure!) So, have I ever had an explosion? No. Why? Because I use what’s called a spunding valve, for example:
https://www.kegland.com.au/products/duotight-blowtie-2-spunding-valve-pressure-relief-with-integrated-gauge-0-15psi
You just set the dial for your desired pressure level and let things ferment to their heart’s content. When done, the beer’s already pressurized so I just chill it and xfer it into a korny keg for storage. Easy peezy. I plan to do the same with root beer soon.

So, how about stopping fermentation while there’s still sugar left in your root beer solution? Here are the ways that come to mind:
1. Heat the solution high enough to kill the yeast. Not good, as it also negatively impacts the flavor.
2. Chill it to 35F-40F which causes yeast to go dormant. This is good if you plan to keep your soda chilled permanently. It becomes a problem, though, if you ever let your soda warm up (e.g. storing in the garage) because the yeast will wake up and party on your soda’s remaining sugar, then BOOM!
3. “Nearly” stop fermentation by adding sodium bisulfite and/or campden tablets which “mostly” kills off the yeast. It’s not exact science, so it sometimes leaves enough active yeast cells hanging around which, while they can’t reproduce any longer, they do still continue fermenting, just really, really slowly. Good, but not perfect.
4. Add potassium sorbate which sterilizes yeast cells to prevent them from multiplying further. Nice, but it doesn’t prevent the yeast cells from still eating the remaining sugar.
5. Filtering. Not cheap, it’s messy, but it’s easy. You pump your barely-fermented soda through a filter, removing the yeast. If the end-to-end process remains pressurized, your soda remains carbonated and the yeast is removed.
6. Back-sweetening. This is easy and common with wine, should work easy-peezy with soda. Only put a tiny bit of sugar in your soda solution, add yeast, let ferment completely. A spunding valve helps a lot, here, regulating your final carbonation level. when fermentation finishes, chill the solution, then the yeast cells drop out of the solution, creating a “yeast cake” in the bottom of your fermenter. (You can speed this up by adding finings.) Then add a little potassium sorbate and sodium bisulfite, then add enough sugar to get your soda to its desired sweetness, then bottle it.
7. Force carbonation. Not cheap, but easiest and most reliable method of carbonating your soda w/ no chance of explosion or even residual yeast over-carbonating your soda since there isn’t any yeast used. 🙂 Just put your soda into a pressurable keg (you can get mini kegs between a liter up to 2 gallons, or get a corny keg for 5gal batches. Put your soda into the keg, attach a CO2 tank, set the pressure where you want it, wait a week, and your soda’s at the desired carbonation level. Home brewers do this all the time and speed up the process by laying the keg on the floor and slowly rolling it back and forth, letting the CO2 permeate the solution faster, typically 15-30 minutes. (It helps to have a friend to chat with, and a couple home brews helps even more.) When done, your soda’s in a keg ready to store, chill, and serve. I’ve even filled 5gal corny kegs, then used a pressure bottle filler to fill up a few bottles to take to a friend’s house, going camping, or whatever. Mini kegs are great, too, because you just stick ’em in the refrigerator, and adding a tap allows it to remain pressurized while allowing for easy serving.

Personally, I like the mini kegs since you only need a small CO2-tap and they easily fit in the frig. However, you might need several when serving for a bunch of people, in which case a full-sized corny keg is the way to go. (Just put the corny keg in a tub of ice and it’s perfectly chilled in an hour or so.) You could also buy a kegerator or make a keezer to store & serve kegs while keeping your soda chilled; both are great because you can keep multiple kegs on hand for serving multiple types of soda, beer, wine, or even plain sparkling water to which you can optionally add flavorings. (I like mashing berries for their juice to add to plain sparkling water; lemons and limes are great, too.)

October 14, 2023 Reply

2 Comments

Lloyd M

I love this article, not huge on content, but huge on passion…just what I like about root beer. 😀 I’m a beer home brewer, dabbling in wines, but I’ve had a lifelong passion for root beer and love trying new ones. (We used to have The Root Beer Store a mile away in Lynnwood, WA; but, alas, it closed a year ago. Now it’s a tax-prep hole-in-the-wall place, definitely not something that sparks one’s passion for root beer. Sigh.)

So about exploding root beer… My mom used to make sodas, including root beer which, of course, exploded one day, starting with 1 bottle and quickly causing the rest to gang-fire explode in one hilariously funny moment, resulting is 4″ of root beer foam all over the family room floor. (It smelled wonderful, though!)

So, being a beer brewer… I do “pressure fermentation” which means fermenting beer in a container suitable for safely maintaining pressure up to 30 PSI, the max you’d ever want to use for beer, though 15 PSI is the typical sweet spot. For soda, some go as high as 60 PSI. (Yeah, bottle explosions under that much pressure will embed glass in your kitchen wall, for sure!) So, have I ever had an explosion? No. Why? Because I use what’s called a spunding valve, for example:
https://www.kegland.com.au/products/duotight-blowtie-2-spunding-valve-pressure-relief-with-integrated-gauge-0-15psi
You just set the dial for your desired pressure level and let things ferment to their heart’s content. When done, the beer’s already pressurized so I just chill it and xfer it into a korny keg for storage. Easy peezy. I plan to do the same with root beer soon.

So, how about stopping fermentation while there’s still sugar left in your root beer solution? Here are the ways that come to mind:
1. Heat the solution high enough to kill the yeast. Not good, as it also negatively impacts the flavor.
2. Chill it to 35F-40F which causes yeast to go dormant. This is good if you plan to keep your soda chilled permanently. It becomes a problem, though, if you ever let your soda warm up (e.g. storing in the garage) because the yeast will wake up and party on your soda’s remaining sugar, then BOOM!
3. “Nearly” stop fermentation by adding sodium bisulfite and/or campden tablets which “mostly” kills off the yeast. It’s not exact science, so it sometimes leaves enough active yeast cells hanging around which, while they can’t reproduce any longer, they do still continue fermenting, just really, really slowly. Good, but not perfect.
4. Add potassium sorbate which sterilizes yeast cells to prevent them from multiplying further. Nice, but it doesn’t prevent the yeast cells from still eating the remaining sugar.
5. Filtering. Not cheap, it’s messy, but it’s easy. You pump your barely-fermented soda through a filter, removing the yeast. If the end-to-end process remains pressurized, your soda remains carbonated and the yeast is removed.
6. Back-sweetening. This is easy and common with wine, should work easy-peezy with soda. Only put a tiny bit of sugar in your soda solution, add yeast, let ferment completely. A spunding valve helps a lot, here, regulating your final carbonation level. when fermentation finishes, chill the solution, then the yeast cells drop out of the solution, creating a “yeast cake” in the bottom of your fermenter. (You can speed this up by adding finings.) Then add a little potassium sorbate and sodium bisulfite, then add enough sugar to get your soda to its desired sweetness, then bottle it.
7. Force carbonation. Not cheap, but easiest and most reliable method of carbonating your soda w/ no chance of explosion or even residual yeast over-carbonating your soda since there isn’t any yeast used. 🙂 Just put your soda into a pressurable keg (you can get mini kegs between a liter up to 2 gallons, or get a corny keg for 5gal batches. Put your soda into the keg, attach a CO2 tank, set the pressure where you want it, wait a week, and your soda’s at the desired carbonation level. Home brewers do this all the time and speed up the process by laying the keg on the floor and slowly rolling it back and forth, letting the CO2 permeate the solution faster, typically 15-30 minutes. (It helps to have a friend to chat with, and a couple home brews helps even more.) When done, your soda’s in a keg ready to store, chill, and serve. I’ve even filled 5gal corny kegs, then used a pressure bottle filler to fill up a few bottles to take to a friend’s house, going camping, or whatever. Mini kegs are great, too, because you just stick ’em in the refrigerator, and adding a tap allows it to remain pressurized while allowing for easy serving.

Personally, I like the mini kegs since you only need a small CO2-tap and they easily fit in the frig. However, you might need several when serving for a bunch of people, in which case a full-sized corny keg is the way to go. (Just put the corny keg in a tub of ice and it’s perfectly chilled in an hour or so.) You could also buy a kegerator or make a keezer to store & serve kegs while keeping your soda chilled; both are great because you can keep multiple kegs on hand for serving multiple types of soda, beer, wine, or even plain sparkling water to which you can optionally add flavorings. (I like mashing berries for their juice to add to plain sparkling water; lemons and limes are great, too.)

October 14, 2023 Reply
- The Root Beer Person
  
  Hi Lloyd,
  
  Thank you for your comment. I sent it to Val, and she had this to say:
  
  Wow Lloyd! You clearly know a thing or two! I did not know that brewing root beer could be such a complicating yet fulfilling process. The food science behind it all is really very fascinating, I appreciate you writing down all of your knowledge. I would be interested in perhaps trying, although, trepidatious, as I would be horrified to end up with four feet of root beer foam or shattered glass in my kitchen. What a treat, however, it must be to have a fresh keg of root beer that you made yourself to serve your friends. May all of your root beers taste sweet!
  
  -Val
  
  June 7, 2025 Reply