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Drink

Root Beer

Root beer made by boiling roots and spruce, sweetening, fermenting with yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Dock and dandelion share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Root Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the brew

  1. Gather a handful each of yellow dock roots, dandelion roots, and sarsaparilla roots, along with a small branch of spruce.

  2. Tie the roots and branch in a bag.

  3. Boil the bag in 3 quarts of water for 30 minutes.

  4. Remove the bag.

  5. Pour the liquid into a crock.

  6. If the mixture is too strong, add more water.

  7. Sweeten with sugar or molasses.

Ferment and bottle

  1. Add 1 pint of yeast to the cooled liquid.

  2. Let it ferment, skimming occasionally.

  3. Bottle the root beer.

  4. Securely cork the bottle.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Dock + dandeliontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together25 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Dandelion + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together80 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Dock + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Yeast
Ferments the sugars, producing carbonation and the drink's fizz.
Sugar or molasses
Provides the sugar that yeast ferments and adds sweetness.
Sarsaparilla roots
Supplies the characteristic root-beer flavor in the brew.

The step that matters

Securely cork the bottle. Fermentation keeps producing carbon dioxide after bottling. A loose cork lets gas escape and the drink go flat, while a tightly sealed bottle can build enough pressure to burst, so the seal must be secure.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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