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How Now: Root Beer Dreams IV

It may come as a disappointment to some (eg. you, Lynn, but no doubt others as well) that I have not forgotten the Root Beer Project. Rather, I have been awaiting the delayed arrival of my root beer selections from the Soda King. The order is finally on its way-I got the email notifcation on Wednesday, and, sorry, but my fascination has been rekindled. (Not that it was ever de-kindled; it's been lying in wait all along.) I have, however, sort of forgotten why I thought that tasting various root beers would help me decide how to brew my own, especially since the ingredients listings on the bottles are the last word in vague.

It will be fun (for me, at any rate) to taste them all, and try to find one approximating the root beer of my dreams. Maybe then, with some help, I can try to identify the most important ingredients. I figure we can have some pretzels to clear our palates, like fancy wine tasters, between bottles, make notes on little tablets...then finish off the remaining root beer with some vanilla ice cream. This is a pretty good reward for the note-takers, in my view, because IMHO, the root beer float (a/k/a "Brown Cow") is the queen of ice cream drinks. It has an old fashioned charm, and I love the weird creamy foam, neither soda nor ice cream, which is generated when you mix the ice cream and root beer.

Results will be reported when tallied. Stay tuned-or disregard-as you will. All root beer posts are clearly labeled, in case you wish to avoid them.

Directions For Brown Cow: Put a scoop of nice vanilla ice cream in a tall glass. Pour chilled root beer over ice cream. Serve with a straw and a spoon with a long handle. (Iced tea spoons are good for this, if you have them. I do, even though I do not have a full set of soup spoons for my everyday flatware. They do not disappear as fast as other utensils, because I use them much less often, and because, even stuck in the back of a drawer, they are conspicuous.) Eat, drink. Be Merry.

Whoo hoo-the root beer is arrived!

Root Beer Dreams Part III: Capping It

Hey , if you've had it with the root beer talk, I understand. At least the posts are clearly labeled, so you can skip them if you like. I can't promise I'll stop soon-I'm kind of wound up about it.

Until zp told me about the root beer episode in Belles on their Toes (a sequel to the the better-known, Cheaper by the Dozen) my biggest worry about making root beer at home was fear that sassafrass root bark might be both essential to the root beer taste, and toxic or carcinogenic. Now I know that bottling a soft drink at home can have other, more immediate and physical dangers. Of course, it can also serve scare off priggish, nosy (or "nebby" as we say here in western PA) relations, should you happen to have any, as in:

"...there was a booming, house-shaking roar in the basement, followed by a metallic ping, as something hit the basement ceiling, directly below us.
Cousin Leora jumped out of her chair in terror, and even Mother dropped her fork.
'Earthquake,' croaked Leora, who had been through the San Francisco one. And then much louder, 'Earthquake!'
There were four more window rattling roars, each followed by a ping, and then we heard something flowing and dripping, down below us.
'Listen at that,' said Tom, 'It ain't no earthquake, it ain't nothing to get excitit about.'
'What in the world is it then?' Mother demanded sharply.
'It ain't nothing but the childrens' beer,' he assured her.
"Mercy Maude' sighed Mother, 'It gave me a start.'
'The children's what?' shrieked Cousin Leora."

Explaining to their the bossy Leora that the children were only making root beer did not appease her. Especially since it turned out that Tom, the family all around handyperson, had added some prunes to a few bottles, making his "root beer" a little more interesting/intoxicating.

In addition to alerting me to explosion hazards, the story got me thinking that I was going to need a bottle capper, if I hoped to keep the caps on bottles of home carbonated goodies. I picked up a nearly new, used model on ebay for a few bucks, ordered some fresh caps and ale yeast from a beer brewing company, and started saving glass beer and pop bottles.I think the bottle capper's pretty cool; it feels very sturdy, and looks like a little red plastic monster-creature with big jaws. I'm looking forward to trying it out. Guess I could try using it to recap half empty bottles of beer or soda with new caps, and keep them fizzy?

I'm still waiting for the regional assortment of root beers I ordered from the Soda King. Once I've got those, we'll have a little root beer tasting, pick up my herbs and start brewing. Feels a bit witchy. Maybe I should find me a cauldron? Stay tuned.

Root Beer Dreams: Part II Soda King

As you may already know, I have been looking to find and/or make a duplicate of the home-made root beer of my (actual) dreams. So, I thought I'd work on checking out a range of root beers being made commercially today. I figured I'd see which ones I liked, and try to get an idea of the ingredients which might, taken together, produce that elusive taste.

I've been picking up root beers locally, with an eye to not so many national brands. I assume a lot of supermarket root beers are watery, or very sweet and they are probably a lot alike, having been the subject of lowest-common-denominator market research. Not that I hate commercial root beer- I quite like it. I'm going to include a couple, to see if I was right, and for comparison. I'm doing bottled root beer only, because most all drinks are nicer in glass than cans. Anyway, when I get around to making my own, I'll be bottling. (I'm not a purist who won't touch canned soda and beer-I just want to give the root beers every advantage, and the proverbial even field of play.)

Now of course I could just be trying these root beers as I find them, and taking notes, but I thought it would be more fun to have a root beer tasting, and get some other opinions. Soooo, Im going to invite a few friends to join me. An advantage of this deal over, say, a wine tasting, is the potential for sampling as much as we like, without needing a designated driver, or a day to recover. Plus, it is both more, and less silly, if you know what I mean.

Since there is a limit to the interesting looking varieties locally, I'm going to add some root beers I ordered on the internet from The Soda King, a very interesting site, especially for momomaniacal obsessives such as yrs truly. They have every sort of soda pop imaginable, including some you may have thought were no longer made. You can actually order one bottle of something, and I did. Of course the postage is ridiculous when compared to the price of the product, but it's still not all that much,all together, soda being pretty inexpensive stuff. I 'm also going to get a lot of vanilla ice cream, so we can finish up with root beer floats, and not waste the goodies. Maybe some pretzels, to, uh, clear the palate between root beers?

So, I'm waiting for the arrival of my out of state soda, and hope to do this maybe next weekend.

These are the root beers I'm planning on so far, though I plan to pick up a couple of bottles of the more mainstream stuff, too:

Indian Wells Root Beer
Boylan's Natural Root Beer Soda (New Jersey)
Clover Classic Root Beer (Chicago)
Napa Valley Organic root Beer(California)
Gray's Gourmet Root Beer (Wisconsin)
Sioux City Sarsparilla (says it is "root beer" on the label)(Iowa)
Stewart's Cold Brewed Draft Root Beer (NY): (This one is available in Pittsburgh, at coffee shops and delis) Can't wait.

Root Beer Dreams: Part I

This week I was canning tomatoes. I have written about canning tomatoes before, as have others with far greater expertise. So happy though it makes me to contemplate my row of jars, I find I don't have much more to say on the topic, at least for the moment. It is always a pretty big project, and I have no intention of doing much else at the stove until it's done. It appears, however, that I am unable to keep quiet, all the same. So I thought I'd tell you about my recurring root beer dreams.

Other people's dreams are famously boring. You can, of course, skip this bit, and I won't be surprised or offended. Personally, though, I often find dreams more interesting than the dreamers, if that makes any sense. By dreams, I mean real, while-you-sleep dreams, as opposed to fantasies. Lots of folks seem to have sadly boring (at least to others) conscious fantasies. (Presumably, they do not themselves find them boring-or they wouldn't bother to concoct them.)

I am almost always intrigued by real dreams, though, including my own. I have been amazed by how distinctive and original an ordinary person's dreams may be. It is cheering to think that people in general may have more potential to delight and astonish than is immediately apparent. Unlike some, I am generally pleased when anyone (who seems neither insane nor predatory) offers to tell me about the odd dream they had last night.

For about a year, some time ago, I kept a notebook by my bed, and wrote down all I remembered of my own dreams, right away, when I woke up. This is a fairly common exercise. If you have never done it, you might like to give it a try. You get a ton more detail than anything you might remember as the day rolls on. Sometimes, when you reread there are cool surprises- for example, wonderful (or terrible) puns- often revealing. Eventually I stopped doing this...It required getting up 15 minutes earlier than normal , and anyway, I had accumulated a bookful of dreams to mull over.

This self indulgent rambling is intended to explain why I have the following precise recorded version of my first, long ago root beer dream. I still have this dream sometimes, and it doesn't seem to vary much. After all this carrying on and justifying, I must admit that my root beer dream is not especially astonishing. In fact, it is probably precisely the sort of dream people have in mind when they say they could not be less interested. I am, nonetheless, attached to it. While far from amazing, it is a little weird, and has had two odd side effects. This is the dream:

I am in a little wooden shack/shop, which is actually some way in to a dark woods, off a dirt road. It is very hot out, though cooler in the woods than on the road. I am about 9 years old. The shop is very empty, dark, possibly deserted, dusty; it is overgrown with foliage. The wood is a little like a fairy tale, and a little like a real forest. It's cooler in the building than outside in the woods. Everything in the shop is old-shelves and stacks of food with old fashioned labels, and so on. The cash register is an antique type, very ornate, with the sort of keys that stick up on stalks.

There is a ceiling fan going and a big chest cooler, plugged in and humming, in the corner. I open it and it is full of frosty bottles of root beer. You have to put money in the cooler to slide a bottle out...a dime (!). I don't have a dime. I also don't have shoes. I'm a bit raggedly, altogether.

A grownup comes in, he looks dusty, too. He has a bicycle outside with a wire basket on it, and he buys most of the root beer from the cooler. Plenty of dimes. He opens one with the can opener on the side of the cooler, and offers it to me. It is some kind of homemade root beer; it has a label stuck on it with the writing in pencil. The root beer is all icy cold and tastes incredibly, amazingly good. There are fishing poles and a box of lures and stuff on the counter, and the guy picks it all up and hands most of it to me. He says that the root beer will be "good with the fish," and that we'd better get going. He puts the rest of the bottles in the basket on the bike, and gets on it. I climb on the back, and we ride off, with me hanging on to the fishing gear.

I have no idea who this guy is. He has clearly mistaken me for someone else. I'm going along in part for the fishing, but mostly for the root beer, I think. The root beer is delicious and different -and I have, (after waking), a strong sensory memory of the taste. We ride off down the dirt road. End dream.

Avoiding interpretation, lurid or otherwise, these are the two side effects of my dream: First, I felt compelled to make a collage of it, back when it made its first appearance. The collage was semi-successful, in that it looks alot like the dream. However, it also looks a little sinister, and the dream doesn't feel scary at all. (I was especially pleased with the look of a reflection of the branch in the "window"-in case you didn't notice.) The other effect is that I have, ever since, had a real yen to make some homemade root beer, and to try to duplicate the great dream taste. ( You see, there is a food connection here, after all. You just have to be incredibly patient with my digressive yammering to get to it. ) Told you it was weird.

When I began looking into it, I discovered that it was a pretty complicated deal to make root beer. with ramifications, including the unwelcome possibility of poisonousness. However, very soon, I intend to give it a try- and I will tell you all about it.