Dr Brew Rude Beer

[Myz Headlee]

Sprecherfire-brewed craft root beer has the rich, creamy flavor that comes from using pure honey. Our brewing team skillfully combines a host of flavors in our gas-fired brew kettle, then ages it just long enough to achieve peak flavor, a super creamy mouthfeel, and a frothy head. Sprecher Root Beer was rated best in the nation by the New York Times. Try some yourself and see why.

Many of these plants were originally used by indigenous north Americans to brew medicinal teas. Early European colonists wanted to take advantage of the healing properties of these roots, but changed the traditional recipes to suit their own tastes and brewing practices.

Ever since, companies that make root beer have used blends of extracts meant to imitate the flavor of Sassafras while avoiding the health risks. Randy Sprecher, the founder of Sprecher Brewery, came up with his own recipe that is a closely guarded secret.

Some brands of root beer choose to add caffeine to their recipes, but Sprecher root beer is caffeine free. We understand that people may want to avoid drinking caffeine, and we want to make sure they can still enjoy the best root beer in America.

We at Sprecher also understand that some people LOVE caffeine, so we offer a caffeinated version of our root beer called Rev'd up Root Beer. It tastes every bit as good as our regular root beer and includes a jolt of caffeine!

Medieval Europeans would make weak "small beers" to have a clean, tasty and nutritious source of drinking water. In the Americas, it just made sense to Europeans to make small beers using local roots like sassafras. Colonists would not drink root beer or other small beers to get drunk; they typically were less than 2% alcohol by volume.

These days, most commercial root beers--including Sprecher root beer--contain no alcohol. This allows many more people to enjoy root beer including children, people with health conditions, and people who choose not to drink alcohol for any number of reasons.

True sarsaparilla (Smilax sp.) is a tropical woody vine that grows deep in the canopy of the rainforest. It is native to South America, the West Indies, Jamaica, the Caribbean, Honduras, and Mexico, where the Spaniards encountered the plant and introduced it to Europe in the 16th century. There are various species of sarsaparilla, all valued by the natives for their medicinal qualities. The ground cover wild sarsaparilla (Aralia nudicaulis) of the northeast is not related to Smilax sarsaparilla but has similar flavoring. Its aromatic rhizomes can be used as a substitute for true sarsaparilla (explaining how it got its name).

Sassafras (Sassafras albidum) was a well-known plant to the natives of the southwestern United States long before the Europeans arrived. It had many uses, including cooking (to flavor bear fat and cure meat) and medicinal purposes. European interest in sassafras brought colonists into closer contact with the Native Americans during the early years of colonization in 16th and 17th century Florida, Virginia, and parts of the northeast. Early European colonizers enjoyed the aromatic scent of sassafras, and legend has it that Christopher Columbus found land from the smell of sassafras.

The tradition of brewing, or fermenting, root beer is thought to have evolved out of other European small beer traditions that produced fermented drinks with low alcohol content. These were considered healthier to drink than possibly tainted local drinking water sources and enhanced by the medicinal and nutritional qualities of the ingredients used. Initially, root beverages were one of many low-alcohol options in colonial America that were thought to be safer to drink than the often-polluted surface water and healthier due to the addition of medicinal (-ish) herbs.

Many herbs and spices are appropriate to use in your concoction, but remember that the signature taste of root beer comes from just a few. The other ingredients help to enhance the flavor, and the amounts can be tailored to your personal preference (or what happens to be in season in your backyard). Below are suggestions of different roots, herbs, and spices that work well in a root beer:

I find it most rewarding if I can source my ingredients locally, especially from our backyard. My home borders state-protected wetlands with plenty of native plants to forage, including several we planted with the making of root beer in mind, like black birch and the root beer plant. I find fresh growth stronger than deep-summer harvested plants (be aware of spring spicebush leaves, their taste is overpowering).

The making of root beer is pretty simple, with first the simmering of the herbal ingredients to make a simple tisane to which sugar is added to create a flavored syrup. This syrup can be refrigerated for up to a year.

The fun way: add a cup of syrup (or more, to taste) to a flip-top bottle, dissolve with non-chlorinated warm (around 98 F) water, and sprinkle a small pinch of bread yeast on top. Close well, and keep at room temperature (70-80 F) until there are visible fermentation bubbles going up the sides of the bottle. Then immediately refrigerate to slow down fermentation, which in turn is pressurizing the bottle.

Susan Verberg lives with her family, furry and human, on a small homestead in upstate New York. She enjoys growing European variety fruits for fermentation, especially wild ferments, in summer and researching traditional meads and herbal beers in winter. She enjoys sharing her exploits in mainstream homesteading magazines, as well as the occasional medieval brewing-oriented academic journal. Visit her website to learn more: medievalmeadandbeer.wordpress.com/

We loved being able to do this ourselves because we could control the amount and kind of sugar, and we could control the flavors and spices. In fact, we actually scrapped our first batch because it was too heavy on the licorice flavor. We landed on a pretty delicious final combination, but I can still see us tweaking it more in the future. I think I might add a bit more vanilla and a touch more cinnamon (to add some bite to it!) in our next batch.

Some folks also use flip-top style bottles (they help release a touch of the pressure) or even canning jars with the lids not 100% tightened. We just liked living on the edge by using regular bottles. We also checked our bottles every 12 hours after brewing for carbonation. Once it hit the sweet spot (it took about 48 hours in our 70 house), we popped the bottles in the fridge to slow the carbonation process down and prevent them from getting overcarbonated.

Not only is homemade root beer fun to make, but it's also so much more flavorful than anything you can get at the store! Feel free to tweak this recipe to appeal to your tastes. We're going to try a bit more cinnamon, vanilla, and orange zest next time.

Cassie is a holistic nutritionist, cookbook author, and all-around food lover. She grew up cooking dinner with her parents every evening, and her passion for home cooking has been strong ever since. Cassie is the author of two published cookbooks (Cooking with Greek Yogurt and Chia, Quinoa, Kale, Oh My!) and dozens of recipes published in major magazines and newspapers. Cassie has been sharing her award-winning recipes on Wholefully since 2010. She loves dark chocolate, homegrown tomatoes, motorsports, and anything that sparkles. She lives in Indiana with her family on a small homestead.

This works when I brew and bottle ciders and beer. The reason bottles are exploding is pressure in the bottle. But if you cap glass bottles really good and one plastic you can monitor the pressure with the plastic bottle. When the plastic bottle feels hard like a new soda, you know the glass bottles are ready. Then heat a pot of water to 180 degrees, turn off the burner (this is crucial) , place the glass bottles in the liquid for 10 minute it will kill off the yeast leavening the desired carbonation and create a shelf stable item and no explorations.

Instead of getting upset that it will be hotter than heck for the next foreseeable future, I will continue to embrace summer and live up my days at the pool, soak in as many late-night sunsets as possible and eat up as much summer food, specifically homemade Fresh Mint Stracciatella Gelato, that I can!

Part of being able to survive the Texas heat is enjoying a variety of refreshing summer drinks and ice-cold treats. Iced coffee, Lemon Berry Iced Tea, flavored sparkling water, and if we want to get super fancy with it and really treat ourselves, a milkshake, root beer float or frozen hot chocolate are all a welcome relief on a hot summer day!

Make this root beer float recipe into an adults only cocktail with a few simple swaps! Simply replace the cold brew coffee with coffee liquor and/or replace the regular root beer with spiked root beer.

Other recipes using root beer:

This root beer float recipe only serves one, but can easily be doubled, tripled, etc. to serve a crowd. With that said, if you happen to have extra root beer lying around, you can use it to make my famous Root Beer Baked Beans or these Root Beer Float Ice Cream Sandwiches!

I have been compiling a list of root beer stands in Ohio over the years and after being cooped up for a year finally decided to start crossing some off the list. Lucky for me, there happened to be a concentrated amount of them in and around Cincinnati.

We decided to hit up the furthest spot first, and work our way back home to Columbus, filling ourselves with not only root beer but also tasty eats as well. Now, I normally only review glass bottles of root beer on this blog of mine. But I am willing to bend the rules from time to time. As a refresher to my rating scale, a 3 is a good review, not crazy amazing but good, which is where I start every review process and then it either moves up or down from there based upon various characteristics. Alight, shall we?

Fitting that we would start with a brewery that is named after U.S. Route 50 which stretches across the entire country from Ocean City, Maryland to Sacramento, California. What a road trip that would be. While they are obviously a brewery at heart, lucky for me many breweries also make their own root beer! So we pulled into their beer garden, ordered a cheeseburger and some cold root beer to start the day.

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