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Drink

Directions for Making Root Beer

Root beer is a sweet, carbonated beverage made with yeast, sugar, water, and root beer extract.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and beer work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 699 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Directions for Making Root Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Make the starter

  1. Dissolve the yeast and 3 tablespoons of sugar in 1 pint of lukewarm water.

  2. Keep the mixture in a warm place for 12 hours.

  3. Stir the mixture well.

  4. Strain the mixture through cheesecloth.

Make and bottle

  1. Add the root beer extract, 4 pounds of sugar, and 5 gallons of lukewarm water.

  2. Mix the mixture thoroughly.

  3. Bottle the mixture, securing the bottles with corks.

  4. Keep the bottled root beer in a warm place for about 48 hours.

  5. After cooling, store the root beer in a cellar or a cool place.

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. Sugar + beertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together699 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Yeast
Ferments the sugar, producing carbonation and a light, fizzy body.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and adds sweetness to the finished root beer.
Root beer extract
Provides the characteristic root beer flavor.

The step that matters

Bottling and warm standing. Corks must be secured firmly because carbon dioxide from fermentation builds pressure inside sealed bottles. Too much pressure can force corks out or burst bottles, so the bottles need to be sealed well and kept in a warm place only as long as the recipe states.

“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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