Homemade Root Beer. Yum yum yum.

Along with plenty of homebrew beer, we're planning to have a non-alcoholic homebrew of sorts at the wedding: root beer!  We'd like to make sure to have a non-alcoholic drink for any of the kiddos, or those of us still kids at heart.  As what we've done recently with everything we're doing "DIY style," we decided to do a practice run of the root beer.  SUPER EASY.  Root beer does not have to ferment, so it was basically the process of mixing all ingredients in keg, connecting the CO2, allow to pressurize, & enjoy.

We decided to go with force carbonation (once liquid mixture is in the keg, using a CO2 tank hooked to the keg & force the CO2 into the liquid - wala! carbonation) - the other option is to carbonate using champagne yeast, which runs very two important risks: a slight amount of alcohol present in the liquid (um, this defeats our purpose for having root beer) & creating too much pressure in the bottles, leading to sticky messy exploding bottles.  No thanks.  We're planning to bottle the root beer for the wedding, so to ease the process of bottling already carbonated root beer from a keg (picture lots of foam spilling all over the place), Steve bought a handy dandy little object that we hook up to the keg which allows one to bottle the carbonated liquid without all the foam.  I don't know what the object looks like, the name of it, or how it works, but when we get to that process, I'll post pictures.  All I know is it allows you to bottle the bubbly stuff without filling the bottle entirely with foam.  Pretty cool.

Of course, after our trial run root beer was kegged, we decided to make root beer floats for dessert.  Oh my, so delicious.  The root beer is not the sugary sweet, watery stuff you get at the store.  It's sweet with a nice hint of spiciness & a yummy, creamy texture.  Real root beer.  :)