Root Beer

Have you ever made your own root beer? Probably not. But you should. It's insanely fun. And relatively cheap. Not that it's cheaper than bottled root beer, but it's infinitely more fun!

So.. here goes. Start the pictures!

 This is what happens once you start to add dry ice... and mostly I have pictures of dry ice bubbling and looking awesome, so maybe I should explain a bit first what's going on, eh?

 Here is the best picture I have of the bottle of flavoring that we used. We have about 10  ottles of this stuff- it's McCormick's Root Beer Flavoring. I don't know if they sell it any more, since this stuff is at least 15 years old. It's still good, though, never fear!

 So, the instructions show how to make 5 gallons of root beer out of the whole bottle, and then carbonate it via yeast fermentation.. which did NOT appeal to us non-alcoholic people... so we came up with another idea. Root Beer Kool-Aid. basically, this meant we drank uncarbonated root beer. Yummy, but missing that fizz.

 It just so happened that my sister wanted to make an Ice Cream Cake for a church activity a while back, and she bought quite a bit of dry ice to transport it so it wouldn't melt. Of course, that created a whole host of problems (*cough* frozen hard as a brick *cough*), but regardless... And no, this isn't the ice cream cake. This is the second one she made.. and transported with a cooler full of ice, NOT dry ice.

 However, we did make good use of that dry ice. We long ago calculated that even with our big family, 5 gallons of root beer was more than we could drink in a night, so we figured out how to make only a gallon at a time. So, when we got home, we made ourselves a batch of koolaid and dumped that dry ice in!

 Not all of it, of course.. but enough to make quite a bit of fizz!

 This is what it looked like underneath all of that fizz.. so if anyone ever says boiling hot, now you can make some witty comment about having seen something boiling cold before!

 Basically, I just took a bunch of pictures of it steaming cold. But I'm serious, this stuff is awesome.

Imagine this in a cauldron at Halloween! (Maybe dyed green..)

Anyway, that's my two cents for the day. Enjoy!

DISCLAIMER/WARNING:
Do NOT try drinking this stuff until it's stopped steaming.. or.. well.. be careful if you do.. not that I tried it..