Root Beer Update

It was good, but it did take 2 tries! The first time I opened the bottle of root beer, it was flat. I added an extra heaping of yeast and sealed the bottle up a second time and another 2 days. This time, success! I'm hoping that my third try will be even better, since the flavor was better the first time I opened the bottle.

The boy and I have been busy bees since we're both taking time off from work. We make good retired people! Our travels plus the "hot" weather (in quotes to show respect to my friends from Austin who have been staying with us and balking at my weather whining) has made me stay away from my computer. A computer produces heat, you know!

During one of our adventures, a friend and I watched the boy kayak surf. In the fog.


It was hot as Hades at our house, but the beach was positively freezing. We were engulfed in fog, which wasn't quite what we had in mind when we decided to go to the beach. My friend and I made sure that the boy wasn't being eaten by sharks, and we knit. I had to stop knitting after awhile because the fog was sticking to my fingering yarn and making my Addis wet. Yuck.

Limantour Beach is also listed as a clothing optional beach, or at least that's what Google told me. We did not run into any nude people, probably because it was frickin' freezing at the beach.

Remember the Cutest Baby in the World. He's 1-years-old now! I wanted to knit him some bibs, but his dad informed me that baby is too cool for bibs and he rips them off.

I also have another sock done. But I'm lame and it's late - pictures will have to wait. Along the "I'm lame" train of thought, I swear I'll get the bread instructions up soon, as well as some more pics of the critters. Eventually. When it's cooler. Although, the thought of the days getting cooler depress me since I see this heatwave as summer's last hurrah.

Homemade Root Beer

What would I do without the Internet? While the boy was driving us to another adventure, we started talking about how far we could take our "no processed food" experiment. Soda pop came up since the boy likes it, but I never purchase it. He wanted to know if soda pop could be something we could make, which made me immediately think of the all natural, home brewed root beer I had enjoyed at Picante a few days before. So, using my handy dandy phone with Internet access, I had our answer a few minutes later. Yes, we could make our own root beer! We could also make lots of our own sodas using extracts, sugar, and yeast.

A quick trip to the Oak Barrel yielded the key ingredient: root beer extract. I had read that the supermarket root beer extract did not have the best flavor, and I knew that Oak Barrel would have a better product.


As with most things, making soda from scratch is much cheaper! It was just under $6 for enough extract to make 4 gallons (over 15 liters) of root beer. The other two ingredients are sugar and yeast, items that regularly reside in my pantry. (OK, OK... Time is not accounted for in this "it's so cheap!" equation, but it took less than 5 minutes to toss everything into the clean, 2 liter bottle and the trip to the Oak Barrel was on my chore route.)


By Sunday, we should be guzzling root beer floats! It will be our little homage to the Slow Food festival in San Francisco.