#us05

I hadn't either, at least not until today.

This weekend Mrs. HomebrewedTriathlete and HoneyBear (my daughter) went out of town for a baby shower, while BrotherBear and I stayed home for some father-son time.  We went out to play laser-tag, ate at Five Guys, and then headed home to try our hand at some homemade root beer.

I'd been meaning to try out my hand at soda for awhile, and it seemed a good father-son activity.

I boiled 2+ gallons of water and 4 cups of sugar while BrotherBear stirred.   I killed the heat, and after it cooled to 180F or so, I added a half bottle of Rainbow root beer syrup (1oz), 1/2 cup of honey, and a tablespoon of vanilla.  I put the pot in a cold-water bath in the sink, and when cooled to 80F or so pitched in a packet of Fermentis US05 yeast.  I let stand for 2 hours and then bottled in glass beer bottles.

In accordance with the instructions with the extract, I thought it would take 3-4 days to carbonate.  One soda website I read indicated that the yeast will stop making CO2 due to pressure all on their own.  This prompted me to post some questions on HomeBrew forum (thread here), which made me realize that I'd pitched about 7 TIMES AS MUCH YEAST AS I SHOULD HAVE!!!

Consequently, I left work to run home to see if everything was OK.  As I'd mentioned when I started the post, this is the first time I'd hurried home to see if a father-son activity had exploded.  It felt a little like the end of OCTOPUSSY, when James Bond was in a clown outfit and attempting to defuse a nuclear bomb.

I'd put the sodas in a plastic tub in the basement, but like a dummy hadn't put the lid on the tub to catch glass-shrapnel.  Luckily, this clown arrived in the nick of time to avert catastrophe.  I put one bottle in the fridge this morning to sample tonight.  It was VERY carbonated, so I put the remaining bottles in my kegerator in the garage to cool.

Moral(s) of the story:

Plastic bottles for soda are a must (no shattering, you can squeeze them to know how pressurized they are)