Recent content by JPennington

LoL, I know! I eventually want to cross over into beers, and I'm already thinking, "Geez, you mean I have to let it run for 4 to 6 weeks?! And then bottle carb it for two more?!?" But I guess it's true what they say, right? Good beer comes to those who wait... :mug:

Final Update on Batch 1: My wife and I opened and shared the last bottle from Batch 1 the other night (on our 1-year anniversary no less ;)). After 2 and a half weeks in the refridgerator, it had gained just enough carbonation to notice the difference. The flavor had improved, and the brown...

Newbie from the Searcy area here! I've got one bottle left out of my first batch of homemade root beer in the fridge. I used an extract for flavoring with a mix of white and brown sugar, and bottle conditioned it using Lavalin EC-1118 dry champagne yeast. Once I figure out what tweaks I want...

Welcome! I'm in the Searcy area, myself. Good to see so many Arkansas homebrewers around!

I adapted a recipe I found presented as "Harry Potter's Butterbeer," which used invert sugar, butter flavoring, rum extract, vanilla extract, and caramel malt. It made an amazing butterscotch soda. At the time I just mixed it by the glass with seltzer from my Soadastream, but I will eventually...

Admittedly, I'm still new to the hobby, but most of the soda recipes I've seen so far call for a pretty reasonable amount of yeast. For example, the recipe I used for the batch of root beer I recently made called for 1/8 to 1/4 tsp of rehydrated dry yeast for a 1 Gallon batch. That was a...

@mredge73 - Thanks for the information! I actually opened a bottle yesterday and discovered exactly what you said: the bottles became a little less pressurized. The root beer has a good flavor, and a subtle-but-noticeable carbonation - far less than I expected it to be at first. That said...

I was very excited to make my first batch of root beer last night using an extract I purchased from Northern Brewer's website. I followed the directions provided with the extract and bottled the batch last night around 9:00 CST. The recipe estimated 3-4 days for the bottles to condition. Much...

How was the flavor of the batch? It looks like you used grape juice as your sole flavoring agent? Diluting the grape juice gave it enough flavor to taste like a proper grape soda, rather than just carbonated grape juice? If so, I bet you could do the same with the different variations of...

Your hobbies and interests actually sound pretty exciting! Sounds like you're a very hands-on person too! I'm new here too, and more or less completely new to brewing myself. Good luck in your experiments!

Greetings! I couldn't help but join in and say hi! I'm pretty much a newcomer to brewing in general, but I've already found this site to be a huge asset to learning the craft. I'm a pretty active member of the Society for Creative Anachronism (or SCA, for short), which is an educational...