First time Root Beer from scratch, need advice on carbonating.

[Timothy Ferreira]

Hi everyone,

So yesterday I started working on my first batch of root beer from scratch. Since this was my first attempt, I made a major mistake, and I'm hoping to save the batch with your help.

I forgot that the root beer won't carbonate without yeast. I didn't buy any yeast, and I have already put my root beer into (glass) beer bottles and capped them. In order to save my root beer, I need to get yeast into those bottles. What yeast should I buy, and how much should I put into each bottle? Or should I dump out all the bottles and add yeast to it all together? There are seven 12oz. bottles in total.

My next question is after some research here, it looks like it is generally not recommended to be carbonating root beer with yeast in glass bottles. Is there any way around this? How do soda companies do it?

Thanks in advance for the help!

 

[AZCoolerBrewer]

There’s tons of sugar in rootbeer, so carbonating it with yeast will make your bottles blow up. The easiest way to carbonate your rootbeer would be to keg it, but that of course would require that you have kegging equipment. You could use heat pasteurization, there’s a thread on that in the cider forum. I have never done it though many people have and report success.

 

[Timothy Ferreira]

Will using a smaller amount of yeast help? Or do the yeast just keep eating until all the sugar is gone?

I was planning on adding X amount of yeast (Unknown amount still) and then letting it sit for only 24 hours before opening one and tasting it, then refrigerating it if it was carbonated, which should stop any further carbonation right?

 

[AZCoolerBrewer]

Yes even a small amount of yeast will chew through every bit of sugar. In one rootbeer you could have enough sugar to carbonate a bottle 20 or more times over before it ate it all up. Putting it in the fridge will slow it down, but it won’t stop it. Definitely look at the sticky on the cider page on how to heat pasteurize your bottles. Have one of your bottles be a PET bottle and when it has firmed up appropriately from carbing, pasteurize all the glass bottles. To add the yeast you could rehydrate a small amount per the directions on the packet and then mix that into your rootbeer in a sanitized bottling bucket. Be sure to read the whole sticky in the cider section so you don’t end up hurting yourself.

 

[Abyssal]

And are you trying to make it alcoholic? Because if you throw yeast in there it will eat all that sugar and produce alcohol. So if you plan on serving this root beer to kids I wouldn't use yeast

But there are some relatively cheap forms of force carbonating!
The simplest would be to find anyone who has a soda stream that they never use anymore and bum it off them!

Next is force carbonating in 2L soda bottles. It looks like your batch would fit in two separate bottles quite nicely.
You can buy all the stuff you need for doing that for looks like around $60 all said and done
Mini CO2 Regulator
Ball Lock to Soda Bottle adapter
16 gram threaded CO2 cartridges

Now I use a similar setup for 1 gallon bear batches, but I personally haven't bought any of those items directly and you could probably find them cheaper if you dig a little