Hires Big H Root Beer Extract, Root Beer Soda and Dessert Syrup, 4 Fl Oz (Pack of 1)

I grew up with home brewed root beer with the old original Hires extract. My grandma would make it in huge batches and bottle it in glass bottles and it would take about a week to carbonate. Man, I remember those summers with fondness. It had its own flavor, enhanced by the yeast, and I grew to love it, especially with Root Beer Floats! As an adult, I wanted to share that tradition with my children, so I looked into it and found the old recipe. Unfortunately the original Hires extract is no longer made. So I searched out the various brands of true extract available and there aren't many. Zatarains is fairly good, though it has a really licoricey flavor that I'm not as fond of. Rainbow Homebrew also makes one that is pretty good, but their bottles are small and fairly expensive. Then I found Hires Big H. They aren't the original Hires I grew up with, but the flavor is darn close and the instructions on the bottle are identical to my grandma's old recipe. Also the price is good. But the good news is that I don't have to make it in 4 gallon batches and find glass bottles and caps anymore. There is a really simple recipe I found that works GREAT and is ready in just 24 hours. It's simple and inexpensive and fun to do with my kids. Here goes. What you need is: 1 2-liter bottle (brand doesn't matter. just make sure it's empty and clean before you use it. Contamination from bacteria will make it taste funny.) 1.5 cups sugar. (Or for a low calorie version, use 1/2 cup sugar and a cup (or equivalent) of granulated splenda or stevia. I prefer a mix of the two. It carbonates just fine) 1/4 tsp yeast (simple bread yeast works, though some prefer champagne yeast which is harder to find) 1.5 tbsp of Rootbeer Extract funnel All you do is use a funnel to pour the sugar in the empty 2-liter bottle. Add the 1/4 tsp yeast, Add the 1.5 tbsp extract and fill to the top with cool water. The yeast is sensitive to heat, so warm water can be too warm and kill it. I just stick with cool water. Filtered water is best, but tap works. Then screw the cap on, shake it up and lay the bottle on its side for 18-24 hours. The bottle should stay at room temperature. It will take forever to carbonate if cold and will die if the heat gets too high. You can tell that the process is working if the bottle becomes tight. If you squeeze it and it's hard as a drum, it's carbonated. If you leave it too long the pressure will just keep building so take care when opening it that you do it slowly or you'll have a root beer fountain. Once it is carbonated, refrigerate it. I will sometimes make a batch and put it in a cooler full of ice to chill it quickly. Chilling the root beer slows down the carbonation process greatly and make it less likely to erupt with suds. Also if you want smaller bottles, you can use this 2-liter recipe, mix it up, but instead of sitting it on its side for a day, fill up empty 20 oz bottles. Each 2-liter does about 4 20 Oz bottles. Then just lay those bottles on their sides and you'll end up with the same results a day later. Enjoy! You'll get excited by how simple it is and if you're like me, you'll want to experiment with carbonating other beverages by adding yeast. (Hint: Apple juice is pretty good, though it tastes beery. Chocolate milk was a mistake.) P.S. for those worried about the fermentation process, you will not get drunk on homebrewed root beer made this way. The yeast does not have enough time to produce any measurable levels of alcohol. I read an article by a professor who did the math and it would take well over two gallons to equal the alcohol in a single beer.

I am cutting carbs wherever I can, and drinking them is absolutely not worth it. But, I also don't want to continue to feed my brain's addiction to "sweet", which means diet pop is also out. So, for a couple of years now, my "pop" has been fruit-flavored, unsweetened, 100% seltzer (such as Safeway Refreshe, Talking Rain, or LaCroix). Most people who still drink soda tell me they hate it (actually that's just sweetness addiction) but I've gotten to the point that it tastes totally normal to me. Anyway, sometimes I just get sick of those fruit-flavored seltzers, and wish I had something like cola or root beer. So I did a bit of searching online for "cola" extracts and what do you know...you can do *exactly* that. My cola extract quest led me to find root beer extract as well! I add somewhere around 1/4 teaspoon of this extract to a 12 oz can of plain, unflavored seltzer. And you know what? It is actually pretty darn good. I've tried a couple of different brands now, and this one tastes the most authentic. Keep in mind that the flavor is milder than actual store-bought root beer at this amount of flavoring, and it isn't sweet at all...but I really like it!. There's no caffeine in this stuff, but it does contain a pretty good amount of caramel coloring by the looks of it. I really don't mind that at all, but if you do, the All Star Extracts Root Beer Flavor doesn't seem to have much (any?)...it just doesn't taste as good, in my opinion. Bottom Line: if you've been missing root beer and are trying to avoid sweetened drinks...I give this a strong recommendation. P.S. I've noticed several reviews where people said that this drink tastes terrible when unsweetened and added to water/seltzer. I cannot stress enough that if you are "used" to sweetened pop (whether with sugar or "diet")...you probably *will* think this tastes bad. Long before I started making my own non-sweetened root beer, I started drinking unsweetened fruit-essence seltzers. Most people I've had try even those think they taste terrible too, at first. I think both taste great, as I'm now adapted to non-sweetened beverages. FYI, though, so that you have proper expectations!

My 11 year old wouldn't tell me what he wanted for Christmas. This opened the field so I could get him something unusual. I decided to introduce him to home made root beer. We purchased a kit from Amazon and he really didn't like the results. So I decided to try other extracts. Watkins and McCormick had a chemical taste. The no-label extract from our local brew store had no flavor. I liked Zatarains but it has a distinct pasty aftertaste (wintergreen oil) that my son did not like. Then we tried Hires Big H. We both liked the taste very much! After making several batches, I decided that the flavor was just too close to bottled root beer and needed something to make it special. After researching several recipes for making rootbeer from scratch, I decided to add cherry bark flavor to the recipe. Our current recipe is: Heat 1 gallon of filtered water to a boil, add 4 lbs plus 1.5 cups of sugar to make syrup. Pour syrup into a 5 gallon Cornelius Keg and add 3 gallons of cool filtered water followed by 1 bottle Hires Big H Rootbeer Extract and 2.7 ounces Cherry Bark Syrup (1/3 of an 8 oz bottle purchased from Amazon). Add filtered water to make 5 gallons then force carbonate at 30 psi for two days rotating occasionally. Drop pressure to 3 lbs to serve. Sometimes we will use a little bit of Zatarains instead of the Cherry Bark. This makes a very good root beer that doesn't taste like everyone elses. Last weekend we served 75 rootbeer floats to a theater group and it went over very well! Highly reccomended

Great for parties and work very well when we make 5 gallons of root beer for parties

The best Root beer ever.

It worked very well for what I was using it for.

Expensive for the product

Super tasty

This is not an extract that you can mix up and then let it sit to develope . Not the original hires rootbeer that I grew up with