Pappy Kurt's Olde Tyme Root Beer

I've always liked root beer. Even as a kid, I (mistakenly) considered myself a bit of a root beer connoisseur. In college, I was introduced to both Henry Weinhard's and Thomas Kemper's root beer, and realized that root beer could be even better. It wasn't long after I started brewing beer that someone asked me when I was going to make root beer. I actually lived with a guy who liked root beer so much that we always had a supply of bottled root beer on hand, because he drank it with every meal. Between my own love of root beer and my desire to make something for my non-beer-drinking, non-cider-drinking friends, I finally caved and bought some root beer extract from the local homebrew shop a couple of weekends ago. Recently, I volunteered to bring some beer in to work for a St. Patrick's day event, and I was going to dye it green. There would definitely be some folks that felt left out, though, so I decided to make the root beer that weekend, and take it in for the work event alongside the green beer. It couldn't have been easier, and the results were great.

Tea Beer Experiment Phase 3: Bottling

We return to the saga of the tea beer. After ten days in secondary, and a quick cold-crash, it was time to bottle the tea beer.  I didn't get much in the way of aroma from any of them, but as noted, they were very cold at the time, and while that did a great job of dropping the tea and other sediment out, it also suppressed any aromas. Bottling is a pain, but fortunately I had a friend over to help, which always makes the process less onerous. Bottling three one-gallon batches is especially annoying, given that you have to clean out the bottling bucket three times, sanitize three times, clean out and sanitize the lines and the bottling wand three times, mix priming sugar three times, and each time through the whole rigmarole only nets you ten bottles of beer. The one fun part is getting to taste the intermediate results, as there is always some lost overhead when bottling.