Early American Root Beer From Scratch (Naturally Carbonated!)

if the year was 1882 when you had a strong hankering for a nice glass of root beer but you didn't want to go to the store and buy it how would you go about making it from home hello my name is Matthew Hunter with Legacy Wilderness Academy and I'm on a mission to document every edible and medicinal plant in the Southeastern us so Southerners can have greater access to nutritious food and free medicine in this video we're going to look at how to make homemade root beer the old fashion way from sassa fras Roots that I harvested right from the wild although we may have a couple modern conveniences to help us the method we'll show in this video is almost identical to how people made root beer in early America we'll talk about how to identify this asres tree and the exact step-by-step process for getting naturally carbonated soda using basic home fermentation so you can enjoy tasty root beer like this right from home before we begin I'll quickly mention that in part one of this video I talk all about the edible and medicinal uses of the sassa tree the tree I have right here beside me so if you want to learn more about the plant that we're using for this video how to harvest it and how to prepare its root bark as well as some of its supposed safety concerns make sure to check out that video in this little button right above me or in the link in the description below this video and while you're in the description make sure to also download yourself a copy of my free guide to medicinal plants to the southeast Check It Out Below although we can grow to a full-size tree sassafras is usually a small tree or shrub with three different types of leaves it has leaves that are either three loed two loed or Mitten shaped or regular with no loes so that's the main way to identify it is the three different shapes of leaves whenever you crush the leaves they smell a lot like Froot Loops I kid you not and the leaves of sassafras are dried and ground into a spice called gumbo F The Roots which will be the topic of this video have an extremely strong root beer flavor in fact root beer you buy in the store is really just a bunch of artificial flavors trying to imitate the flavor of sassa fras we're going to be making one gallon of root beer for this video so we'll start by bringing the water to a boil [Music] now that we've brought this water to a boil we're going to go ahead and add our sassr root bark this is about 1 cup or 20 gam of shredded or stripped sassr root bark we Harvest it from the wild and just peeled it off and so obviously one cup is going to be different if you if you buy it and it's already powdered then it's not going to be one cup which is why we measure it so this is about 20 G and we're going to go ahead and pour it in and then we're going to let it simmer for 25 to 30 minutes now that this has been boiling for about 25 minutes we're going to go ahead and add two cups of sugar or maybe about 2 and 1/4 cups cuz I do have a sweet tooth and the sugar is important the yeast is going to break down the sugar and it when it breaks it down it's going to break it down into alcohol it's going to have a little bit of alcohol in here but it's going to be like a negligible amount and then it's going to break it down into carbon oxide and the carbon dioxide is what is what's going to give this root beer its natural fermentation so it is important that we add sugar in [Music] this now that we've added sugar the next step is we have to add yeast but we do not want to add the yeast when it's still hot so we have to wait for this to cool down the yeast is very sensitive to heat it's going to die if we add it when it's still hot we have to wait until this cools down to a lukewarm temperature before we add the yeast uh the very first two batches I made of root beer both I rushed the process the yeast died it didn't ferment so it didn't add the carbonation and I wasted those two batches so I've learned don't rush this step however if we were just to leave it in this pot it's going to take you know half the day to cool down so instead I'm going to pour it back into this glass jug that's going to help it cool down a lot quicker but before I do that we need to begin the sanitation process from here on out we want to make sure that every surface that our sassr tea touches is completely free of germs and that's going to help us avoid contamination so from what I understand there's not a risk like there is with the canning of botulism but if bacteria gets into the bottles and sort of ferments then it can give it like an off funky flavor and we definitely don't want that and so soda makers from everything I I've seen don't recommend using soap to wash the bottles out because they say that the Soapy flavor sticks in there so instead what we're going to do is we're just going to use chlorine disin infecting bleach we're going to fill up a 5 gallon bucket and we're going to do 2 tablespoons of bleach for every gallon of water so we have four gallons of water here we're going to do 8 tablespoons of bleach making sure obviously not to get it on our clothing and that's about good enough just like that next we're going to dunk every single thing that we uh are is going to come in contact with our root beer into this water so I'm just going to kind of stir this up and before I pour it in into this glass jug this is going to get sterilized so this is going to get dunked in here some people say you know to wait a certain amount of time we're just going to dunk it in let it sit for a few seconds take it out and then we're going to rinse everything off in PIP and hot tap water from the sink so we're not going to obviously let all this chlorine water be sitting in the bottom of this of this jug or in our bottles or anything like that we are going to be rinsing it off so I'll dunk it in probably should have done three gallons instead of four I'm also going to be dunking in my funnel and then I have here a fine mesh coffee filter that I'll be using to filter out the bark putting that in too all right so now we're going to pour it into this glass jug just to make it cool off a lot quicker put in the funnel little mesh strainer and now we'll go ahead and wait until it's lukewarm and of course there's a a little bit left so we better not waste anything all right now that our sassafras T has cooled down to about a lukewarm temperature we're ready to start filling up these bottles so you can use different types of bottles technically you can use plastic bottles I have seen people do that but they don't last very long you may get one you know two uses out of them I'm not really sure because I don't use plastic but the proper way to do it is to use glass bottles and you can you don't have to have the swing top Lids like I do see I have these fancy swing top Lids because I figured you know I would I wanted to invest in them just so that I could be able to do this long term you can also use just glass soda bottles but if you choose that route you do have to buy the bottle caps and then there's like a little uh press that clamps on the the bottle cap to the bottle so we're just going to go ahead and fill these up before we do though we're going to go ahead and add our yeast so I'm just using some ale yeast from what I understand you can use wine yeast or champagne yeast um in fact one soda making book he used champagne yeast for everything another soda making book he used ale yeast so I decided to use ale yeast and for this whole gallon I'm going to put in 1/8 of a teaspoon of this ale yeast and I forgot to sanitize my little teaspoon so I'm just going to eyeball it try to get about an eighth of a teaspoon in there hopefully it's right then I'm going to let that sort of uh rehydrate and I'm going to shake it up really good and then we'll go ahead and start filling these up all right we've given this about 2 minutes to sort of rehydrate we've also shuen it up quite a bit to sort of agitate that yeast to get it going and now we'll go ahead and fill up these bottles so these are 16 oz bottles which means we're going to be using eight of them if you're using 12 O bottles a gallon you'll use about 11 12 oz bottles so keep that in mind the last thing we're going to do is we're going to take all eight of these bottles and shake them vigorously for about 30 seconds each then we're going to put them on the counter outside of direct sunlight some people say put them in a dark cabinet I just put mine on the counter and we're going to leave them there for about 2 days then we're going to check them and to check them all you do is you just pop it open if you have a swing top bottle or a or a if you're using a plastic bottle you just loosen the lid and you'll be able to tell if it's carbonated enough you can also will be able to see the carbonation kind of bubbling on the inside of it and it only takes about 3 days we might want to check after two keep in mind these will explode if left too long so after 3 days we're going to be refrigerating them then they will last quite a bit longer because it it slows down fermentation to where it's almost not happening anymore and then we will have carbonated rot beer I'll see you then okay so now that it's been a couple days you can go ahead and test the level of carbonation by simply opening the bottle and if it's at the level of carbonation that you want this one is about perfect then you can go ahead and refrigerate it um if it's not quite what you want then you can leave it on the counter for another day and test it again it usually takes about 3 days but in higher heat it can take 2 days so you want to test just one bottle after 2 days see if it's about the carbonation level you like and then refrigerate now before Refrigeration keep in mind that these cannot just be left on the counter or the pressure will continue to build up and build up and eventually they will explode so before Refrigeration they would have been moved to a cool place like a root seller where then you'd still want to drink it within a few days uh to a week after about a week you'd begin to run the risk of the bottle bursting uh now with refrigeration it it really slows down the the fermentation and carbonation process but it doesn't completely stop it so even with refrigeration maybe about a month you want to try to drink these within about a month or you do run the risk of bottles bursting open in your fridge but it will last a lot longer because that that carbonation is slowed down and by the way after about 2 Days in the fridge something happens to the flavor and it starts to to be a lot better after Refrigeration so guys now you can enjoy a frosty cup of homemade root beer or a root beer float made with real sassafras roots and once you get this recipe down you could start experimenting with other plants like vanilla Wild Cherry Bark sasparilla or even Wintergreen and so do keep in mind that sassafras is a powerful blood thinner and can affect blood pressure so if you're someone that has you know blood pressure issues or takes any of those types of medic blood thinners or blood pressure medication you know be very careful with this plant it is a powerful medicinal plant as well people were not drinking big 32 oun sodas throughout history so I recommend doing a much smaller cup of sassr root beer 6 or 7even ounces and also that alcohol in this is very very low so I consider it safe for kids I give it to my four-year-old daughter no problem so guys keep in mind if you want to learn more about the sassa tree you can do that in this video right here and also make sure to download my free guide to medicinal plants which you can see in the link in the description below this video again my name is Matthew Hunter see you in the next one

Channel: Legacy Wilderness Academy

Views: 101,373

Keywords: sassafrass, sasafrass, sasafras

Id: 3DLHOMIM9d0

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 27 2024