Sticky Business

We had a bunch of old pop bottles, and a serious amount of dad’s beer bottles, stacked up in the cellar, so we decided to put ‘em to good use. What could be better than making our own root beer. Shoot, we barely ever bought pop because it wasn’t a necessity. So this is the best we could do. Takes a fair bit of work to get it done, but it’s sooooooo worth it.

First you gotta wash out all those bottles so they’re good and clean. Don’t want any bacteria in there. Lots of scalding hot water, soap, and a dash of bleach in the big ol’ farm sink. No dishwasher in this house. Set those to drying and start gathering the rest of the ingredients: sugar, yeast, root beer flavoring, and some dark molasses.

Mom starts with a gallon jug and fills it with warm water. Drop in the yeast and let it ferment until it’s foamy. Oh say, about 10 minutes. Meanwhile we put the other 5 gallons of warmed water into one of our big crocks. Pour in the 5 gallons of sugar. And stir, stir, stir until all that sugar is liquid. Add the root beer extract and molasses and stir again. Last, gently pour in the yeast mixture and mix it in real good. We’ve lined up all the bottles on the table and grabbed the funnels to fill them with. Once the whole concoction is happily labeled into the jars, it’s time to cap them. “Leave enough room at the top for the brew to breathe,” mom says. Not sure what that means, but ok. A bottle capper that does the job lickity-split. Once all the bottles are capped and rinsed from any sticky that happens to spill down the sides, they’re packed in wood boxes and stored in a cool, dark place.

The cellar is the logical place for them, but since the boys have their bedroom fixed up out there, mom thought they might try to sneak some. So instead she and dad packed them away underneath their bed so none of us kids would open ‘em before it’s time. Mom says it takes 3-5 days before they will be ready. Oh my gosh! That’s forever. Ugh.

Now we wait.

I ask mom to check them every day. “Not yet,” she says, “it’s still brewing.” It’s so hard to wait. “Probably tomorrow,” she said on day 3. Alrighty then. I go to bed dreaming of frothy, ice-cold root beer. Sometime in the night I wake up to some kind of crazy commotion. I hear a bang and a pop and dad cussing and yelling something about “Where the hell is my rifle”. I run to their bedroom, my sister, Laurie, close behind, and see dad, butt ass naked, looking out the window trying to see where the gunshots are coming from. Took a few more minutes of “gunshots” and the smell of root beer wafting up from under the bed before they figured out the pop was blowing up. Mom and dad both get down and look at the disaster brewing under the bed. They grab the boxes and run them outside. The boys are startled awake and come out of the cellar. Dad barks at them to get into the house and help with the mess.

Dad lifts the mattress and box spring up and sets it against the wall. We do our best to clean up the syrup-yeast mixture with towels, but it’s well soaked into the carpet. Mom gets some warm water to pour onto the carpet and we start the whole sopping up process again. All the towels go into the washer and we all sink back into bed for a few more hours of sleep. The next morning we went out to check the root beer. About a third of the bottles didn’t explode. All that work and waiting went to waste. We promptly put the unexploded bottles in the fridge to enjoy once they were ice-cold.

Don’t know what went wrong. Maybe too much yeast or the bottles didn’t get clean enough. Could have been our well water that tastes like sulfur. Who knows. We never tried making our own root beer again. One long-lasting benefit was that mom and dad’s bedroom smelled like root beer for a good long time. Especially when the weather was warm.