How Root Beer is Made
These are the 2 main steps of root beer production:
- Mixing up a concentrated syrup made by combining the ingredients listed below with hot water.
- Carbonating. This is either done by diluting the syrup with carbonated water directly, or diluting the syrup with still water and carbonating the resulting mixture by force carbonation, natural carbonation, or adding dry ice.
Root Beer Ingredients
- One or several sweeteners:
- Cane sugar, brown sugar, honey, molasses, corn sugar, or even agave
- A broad range of spices, extracts, and essential oils. These are all commonly found in root beer recipes:
- Cinnamon, cloves, allspice, vanilla, wintergreen, sweet birch, artificial sassafras, anise, licorice root, and burdock
Commercial root beers generally include the addition of:
- A foaming agent: Yucca or Quillaja extract
- A thickener: Maltodextrin
- A emulsifier: gum arabic, guar gum, or xantham gum
- Some acidity for flavor and shelf life, generally: citric acid, ascorbic acid, or phosphoric acid
- A preservative for shelf life, generally: Sodium Benzoate and/or Potassium Sorbate
Carbonating Root Beer
This is the most challenging part after you have your syrup recipe down, and often requires special equipment. The root beer syrup is often diluted with water and then carbonated with one of the following:
- Naturally carbonating by introducing some yeast to the mixture. The yeast will eat some of the sugar through the process of fermentation resulting in alcohol and C02. It’s possible to carbonate with this method and only produce a very small amount of alcohol, although it’s easy for the fermentation to get out of control! Fermentation often has some additional off-flavors.
- Force carbonated with C02 gas. This can be done in a keg on a smaller scale. Commercial producers either use chilled brite tanks like in the beer industry, or a contraption to rapidly cool the mixture while forcefully injecting C02 into the mix in the bottling line immediately before filling the bottles
- Adding dry ice to your root beer. 1 lb of dry ice per gallon if root beer is a good standard, but don’t seal the container completely or the pressure might build up until it explodes!
Brite Tank:
