Better than Bought Root Beer
- One bottle "Homebrew" brand root beer extract
- One bag of Gnome "Draft Style Root Beer" extract
- 4lbs cane sugar
- 2/3 cup molasses
- "Muntons Kreamy X Primer with Heading Powder" OR a packet of heading powed, and ~150g of DME
- 5 gallons of water, divided
Add four gallons of water to your keg, and carb the hell out of it. I left mine at 30psi for a couple days and it was nice and spritzy. Sodas need a lot higher carb that beers do. It'll carb a lot easier with no sugars in it.
~2 days before when you need to have the rootbeer done, make the syrup. Add about 3 quarts of water to a large pot. Add in the cane sugar, molasses, DME and heading powder. Warm and stir until all of the compents are completely disolved. Then, leave it to cool. Once room temp, stick it in your chiller next to your keg to make it nice and cold. Leave it over night.
On the day before, bleed of the pressure in your keg, and open it up. Carefully pour in the syrup. Then add the two root beer extracts. Seal it back up, and put some pressure on it. Then shake it up well to make sure everythign it combined. Blowing CO2 in the 'out' tube will help agitate it well.
On the morning up, give it a taste! Mostly you're checking for carb levels. If it needs more, now's the time as it'll take a few hours to settle down after you've added more CO2.
This really benifits from a good, long length of beverage line. I have a picnic tap that I use specifically for sodas and its about double the length of a normal one. This helps will foaming.
Enjoy!
One important note: Rootbeer flavor tending to linger in your gear. I have a keg that I use only for soda, and more specifically this root beer. If you keg a beer in this later on, you may get a residual root beer flavor. Same goes for the serving tap. Just be aware!