Looking to make some good old fashion root beer with a bit of alcohol in it? Well, we break down how in this episode of BrewTalk with Mr. Beer.

A while back we used to have a kit to make hard root beer. While the kit was discontinued you can still brew up a batch of hard root beer pretty easily.  

You will need a few things to get started, a standard refill, US-05 Ale Yeast, a root beer refill, and our Root Beer caps and gasket strip. You also need to have a fermenter that you are not afraid to toss and some plastic bottles you are not afraid to toss or set aside for hard root beer only.  

The main reason for that is the root beer flavoring can leach that flavor into the plastic and then that flavor will be in all your future brews. So you either need to set aside a fermenter and bottles to use for hard root beer or just toss them if you don’t like it.  

Now the brewing part is very easy. You will brew up your standard refill as the normal brewing instructions.  

When we had the kit we did the classic American light refill, but you can always try different refills to see how it tastes.  

So once your beer is done fermenting, you need to sanitize a second fermenter.  

Then in the second fermenter, you will add 2-3 cups of white or brown sugar depending on how sweet you want it to be.  

Then you will transfer your beer to the second fermenter. You will want to use a sanitized tube for this, just find one that fits around the outside of the fermenter. You want to minimize aeration as much as possible during this step.  

Once your beer is transferred into the second fermenter you will add the 2 packets of root beer mix. Then you will mix slowly with a sanitized spoon until the sugar is dissolved.  

From there you will bottle like you normally do, except instead of using regular gaps you will use our Root Beer caps and gaskets. We use special caps with holes in them and a gasket to prevent the bottling from exploding when the root beer is carbonated.  

That’s it, you let it sit for 2 weeks to carbonation and condition, and then it's ready to drink.  

If you have any questions about how this works just shoot our customer service team an email and they would be glad to help.  

Cheers,  

Robert