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Peruvian, Ottawa, or Root Beer To Charge in a Portable Fountain
Place in a suitable fountain ½ gallons of syrup, mentioned in preceding formula, omitting the soda foam, add water enough to make 10 gallons, and charge with gas to a pressure of 100 pounds. To be drawn from the apparatus in the manner of soda water, but without syrup. The beverage can be dispensed more readily by use of a beer pitcher (made to draw from the bottom), from which the tumbler is partially filled with the solid beverage, and the remainder drawn directly into the tumbler. Root beer is always better and a larger seller when served from a root beer set in steins. ROOT BEER SET.
If you want the best of everything, stand your thin tumblers on the rims in crushed ice. They will retain their coldness a long time.
This is the bulk-dispensing companion to the syrup formula that precedes it in the book: instead of pumping syrup into each glass, the whole beverage is pre-mixed and carbonated in one vessel. The proportions and the pressure are the two numbers that need attention.
- The dilutionHalf a gallon of syrup to a finished 10 gallons is roughly 1 part syrup to 20 parts water, thinner than the 1 part in 5 or 6 often cited for a hand-drawn fountain glass. The original prints "½ gallons," which is ambiguous; taste the mix before charging and expect to want more syrup than this if your extract is mild.
- PressureDo not take the 100 lb figure to a modern vessel. Corny kegs and homebrew setups carbonate at roughly 10 to 30 psi, far below the pressure called for here. Any pressurized vessel must be rated for the pressure and fitted with a working relief valve.
- "Omitting the soda foam"Soda foam was a foaming agent, usually a saponin extract of quillaia (soap bark) or yucca, sold to give drawn drinks a head. The book does not say why it is left out here; if you are following the earlier syrup formula, skip that ingredient.
- "The solid beverage"This means the liquid without foam, drawn off the bottom of the pitcher where it has settled. Filling the tumbler part way from the pitcher and topping it from the fountain tap gives a controlled head instead of a glass of froth.
- Sassafras in the syrupNineteenth-century root beer leaned on sassafras root bark, which contains safrole and has not been permitted as a food flavoring in the United States since 1960. Modern root beer extracts and safrole-free sassafras are what you will find for sale.
- YieldTen gallons is about 160 eight-ounce glasses, a commercial batch. Scale the ratio down rather than making this quantity for a household.
- ServingThe "root beer set" was fountain equipment, a dispenser with matching steins, sold for the purpose. The last line directs you to stand thin tumblers on their rims in crushed ice, which it says will keep them cold a long time.
"Peruvian," "Ottawa" and "root beer" appear here as three names for one drink. Commercial root beer is generally traced to Charles Hires, who began selling a packaged extract in Philadelphia in the 1870s, and by the time trade manuals like this one were written the drink had become the fountain's great warm-weather staple. The instruction to serve it in steins from a matched "root beer set" is pure merchandising, and the book puts it in those terms: root beer is better and a larger seller when served from a root beer set in steins.