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Drink

Root Beer

A homemade beverage made from root beer extract, yeast, sugar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Beer and sugar 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 ↓

Root Beer

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dissolve the yeast in 1 cup of warm water.

  2. Add sugar, salt, and root beer extract; mix well.

  3. Stir in 8 quarts of warm water.

Bottle and ferment

  1. Bottle the mixture.

  2. Set bottles in a warm place for 12 hours.

  3. After 12 hours, move bottles to a cold 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. Beer + sugartop 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 carbon dioxide that carbonates the drink.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast and provides the drink's sweetness.
Root beer extract
Supplies the characteristic root beer flavour and aroma.

The step that matters

Setting the bottles in a warm place. Yeast ferments most actively when warm, and this fermentation produces the carbon dioxide that makes the drink fizzy. Moving the bottles to a cold place afterward slows the yeast down.

“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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