I made batch 5 today:
2.5oz sassafras root bark (wanted 3oz, only had 2.5)
1oz sasparilla root bark
1oz wintergreen leaf
1 tbsp anise seeds (not star anise)
3 vanilla beans, guts scraped of course.
3 lbs (6 cups) organic buckwheat honey (almost)
1 gal boiling water
1 gal ice
1 gal water
Boil 1 gal water. Add roots, leaves, seads and vanilla guts and husks. All, straight into the water. I sometimes use a grain bag, but I wanted this amount of stuff to have room to move around. Boil for 10 minutes, stiring about half the time. (It takes the barks a bit of time to saturate with water; they float to the surface until then. Keep stiring them into the water.) Start adding honey. 6 cups is a lot of honey, and it doesn't disolve instantly, so add it slowly. I just poured it from the jars I bought it in, in a slow ribbon. The whole process took about five minutes. Total boil time so far: 15 minutes. Boil for another 2 or 3 minutes just to make sure everything is disolved. Pour into a sanitized bowl that has a similarly shaped and sized fine mesh collinder (also sanitized) in it. Pull the collinder out, taking the vast majority of the roots, leaves, seads and vanilla husks with it. (My bowl wasn't big enough for the whole batch, so I had to do this twice.) Pour filtered mixture into sanitized keg. This is where you would do additional filtering if you don't want little bits of stuff in your root beer. I tried filtering through cheese cloth, but it just fell in the keg, so I gave up. Start adding ice to the keg until it stops melting quickly when stirred (with a sanitized utensil of your choice, natch.) Fill the rest of the keg with water. Cap, shake to mix, and carbonate.
Notes:
- Standard disclaimers apply: Use water and ice from a good, clean source. If you don't have a filter in your house, get bottled "drinking water" and "party ice" from the store. I just used water from my under-sink mounted filter. We've since hooked up the ice maker in our freezer to this filter too, so in prep of this day, I bagged all the ice that was made at the time and got the freezer cranking out more ice. It took about 1.5 "ice maker drawer" loads.
- The windergreen leaf I got from the hippy food store near me smelled NOTHING like wintergreen mints or anything. We'll see what it does to the taste of the root beer. I've considered crushing up a few wintergreen Altoids and adding that to a batch. :)
- This is a heck of a lot more anise than in any previous batch. I hope I don't regret this. I was planning on putting only .5 tsp in the batch, but it just didn't look like enough, so I added more. ...and more... Hmm..
- The full 6 cups of honey didn't quite make it into the batch. There's maybe 1/3 cup left over. It just sticks to the walls of the jar. I didn't work very hard to get it out.
- I know that with the brewing of tea, the longer you brew, the more nasty chemicals you get out of the tea leaves that make your drink taste very bitter. In an effort to remove some of the bitter or astringent taste of the root beer, I tried brewing for less time. I only did 10 minutes before adding the honey. I suspect this is not enough of a difference to notice, but we'll see. Next time, I'll try brewing for 5 minutes before starting to add the honey for a total brew time of about 10 minutes.
I didn't taste the final mixture before sticking it in the kegerator, and I haven't finished hooking up the beer line yet, so I can't even get any out of it now. I'll post again when I have a chance to taste it.