Well, you can drive down to the Dollar General and buy yourself a 3-liter of off-brand high-fructose corn syrup root beer. Or, you can do better. Here’s how you do better. Making sassafras root beer at home.
The tools you’ll need for this are a knife, bowl, pot, stove, sieve, and spoon. The ingredients you’ll need are sassafras root, water, molasses, sugar, anise, clove, mint, and coriander seeds. All of that you can buy at the store except for sassafras root. So that is where the adventure begins.
You need to find some sassafras root. Specifically, the root of saplings; young trees. Don’t worry that you’ll be killing the trees in the process. Sassafras is not an endangered species, and if you merely thin out an area of sassafras (and not kill all of it) it will come back.
Sassafras is easy to identify by its leaves. It actually has three different types of leaves, which is quite unusual. The types are 1-lobed, 2-lobed, and 3-lobed. The 3-lobed version looks a lot like a dinosaur footprint to me. And all the leaves turn orange in the fall. You want to find saplings that are a couple feet tall. If they are too big, you won’t be able to pull them out of the ground. If they are too small, you won’t get much root to work with. Each sapling will give you about 6 inches of good root. The smell is amazing. If it doesn’t smell great, you don’t have the right tree. You need to pull out a couple dozen saplings. I think “the more the merrier.” So the recipe I use says “3 ounces” but I probably use more than that.
The trick I’ve found in the whole operation is that cleaning the roots with water is not enough. I did that once and my root beer still tasted like dirt. What you want to do is take a knife and scrape off all the bark of the root, dirt included. You might lose some flavor, but you’ll get rid of all the dirt.
Cutting the sassafras root into pieces helps to get the flavor out when you’re boiling it. The more surface area the better. Cutting them can be challenging. For most sapling roots you can use tree trimming hand shears. For larger roots I’ve even used a saw. You just have to be careful not to cut yourself because the pieces are fairly small and you might have to hold them close to where the saw cuts.
The mint is not really necessary. I’ve added that half of the time. Lately I’ve been adding extra mint because we have it growing wild in abundance in our side yard.
So then this is the recipe I’ve used for years, making root beer about twice a year and making a lot of people happy:
Ingredients
6 cups water
3 ounces fresh sassafras root, or use 3 ounces sassafras root bark
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
1 whole star anise
1 whole clove
1/4 cup dark molasses
4-5 fresh mint leaves
3 cups granulated sugar
Directions:
1. In a large saucepan, combine water, sassafras, coriander, star anise and clove. Set pot over high heat and bring to a boil, then drop heat to low and simmer for 15 minutes.
2. Add molasses, stir to combine, and simmer for 5 more minutes. Remove saucepan from heat, add mint leaves, cover pot with a tight-fitting lid, and let cool completely.
3. Place a fine-meshed sieve over a large measuring cup or bowl with a pour spout and pour syrup through. Let drain completely and discard roots and spices.
4. Return liquid to saucepan, add sugar and bring the syrup to a boil. Drop heat to low and simmer for 5 minutes.
5. Pour the syrup into a large, clean, dry ball jar with lid, cover and let cool. Store syrup in refrigerator for up to a year.
This gives you a syrup which you’ll then need to mix with seltzer water to make the final product. I use about 2 parts seltzer “bubbly” water for 1 part syrup.