All Natural Root Beer

Here we have a very old fashioned and all natural root beer recipe.  These days, pretty much all root beer is made from concentrate, which isn't hard to come by and will produce some delicious root beer, but this recipe takes us back to simpler times of foraging in the forest to make your delicious tonics.  This recipe was found by fermenter Rachel McCain and comes from Nourished Kitchen, and it proved a challenge in itself to obtain the lengthy list of ingredients.  As luck would have it, I took back to back trips to Bend, OR and Arcata, CA in the past week and was able to find all the necessary ingredients from local shops, including: Savory Spice Shop, Nature's Natural Foods, Platypus Pub & Brew Shop (all in Bend) and Moonrise Herbs (in Arcata); all the shops are great local businesses and are worth a trip, and club member Barley and I had a great time meeting and hanging out with the shop keepers on our quest for ingredients.

One change was made to the recipe: I substituted Spearmint leaf instead of Wintergreen leaf because none of the shops carried wintergreen.  Wintergreen is the primary flavor in modern root beer, so this brew will taste different than what we're all used to.  However, traditionally-made root beer's main flavor comes from the sassafras, which we had plenty of, so this recipe should still be very much in line with what an old-fashioned root beer should taste like.

Two batches of root beer were made over two nights, with good company shared and some store-bought root beer consumed to set the tone.

Round 1:

Ingredients:
1/4 cup sassafras root bark
1/4 cup spearmint leaf (replacing wintergreen leaf)
2 tblsp sarsaparilla root
1 tblsp licorice root
1 tblsp ginger root
1 tblsp dandelion root
1 tblsp hops flowers (I used Mt. Hood hops, which have an alpha acid of 6.1%)
1 tblsp wild cherry tree bark
(the recipe calls for a tablespoon of birch bark also, but I couldn't find any)
1 tsp juniper berries
1 cinnamon stick
1 cup cane sugar
1/2 cup whey (given by fellow club member La Levadura from his kefir-making)

Procedure:
Bring 2 1/2 quarts of water to a boil
Add roots, berries, leafs, bark, flowers and cinnamon to boiling water
Reduce heat, simmer for 20 min
Strain through cheese cloth into pitcher
Add sugar, stir in to absorb
Let sit and cool to body temperature
Stir in whey
Pour into bottle, seal the lid

Round 2:

On the second night, club members Ross Morgan and Trevor Johnson joined, and Trevor brought over his bucket full of sourdough starter from Bakery By The Sea in Brookings, OR.  While brewing root beer, we also made an awesome loaf of garlic sourdough.

Same ingredients, same procedure
With exception: Substitute 1 tablespoon of yeast (pulled from Kelley's Rock Creek Brown Ale) instead of whey in order to make it alcoholic.

With alcoholic fermentation, the process is a lot more active and productive, and because of this I topped the bottle with an airlock instead of sealing it which will allow the CO2 byproduct to escape and not make the bottle explode.

PICTURES COMING SOON!

-Volatile Flavonoid