Home › At the Fountain › Root Beer Syrup
Root Beer Syrup
American Root Beer Extract, 4 ounces; Plain Syrup, 1 gallon; Sugar Color, 1 ounce.
This is fountain shorthand: a flavoring formula for bulk syrup, meant to be drawn by the ounce and finished with carbonated water at the tap. Nothing here is cooked, so the whole job is getting the base syrup right.
- "Plain syrup" is not thin simple syrupFountain plain syrup was a heavy stock syrup, made close to saturation, in the region of two parts sugar to one part water by weight. Made thinner, the drink tastes watery and the syrup is far more liable to ferment or mould.
- Sugar color"Sugar color" is caramel color: sugar cooked past caramel to a dark, nearly flavorless liquid, sold today as caramel coloring or gravy browning. One ounce per gallon is for appearance only. Burnt sugar you make yourself will read sweeter and more bitter than the commercial article, so add it by eye.
- Extract strength variesFour ounces per gallon assumes a fountain-strength extract. Retail root beer concentrates sold now are formulated for home batches and differ widely in potency, so mix a small trial — say one ounce of syrup topped with soda water — before committing a gallon.
- Proportion at the glassFountain practice was roughly one to one and a half fluid ounces of syrup in an 8-ounce glass, the rest cold carbonated water, stirred briefly to keep the gas. At that rate a gallon (128 fluid ounces) yields somewhere between about 85 and 128 drinks.
- Cold and carbonated matters more than the recipeSyrup and water should both be near freezing before they meet; warm water holds little carbon dioxide and the drink goes flat as it is poured.
- StorageA properly heavy syrup keeps for weeks refrigerated in a clean sealed bottle. If yours is lighter than fountain strength, treat it as perishable and hold it under refrigeration for a week at most — cloudiness or a yeasty smell means discard.
- On sassafrasRoot beer extracts of this era were built on sassafras root bark. Safrole, its main aromatic, was barred from food use in the United States in 1960; commercial extracts sold today are safrole-free and are what this formula should be made with. Do not substitute home-dug sassafras root.
The American Soda Book belongs to a genre of trade manuals written for the man behind the marble counter, not for the household cook — hence a recipe that lists an extract, a stock syrup and a coloring, and assumes the reader owns a carbonator. Root beer began as a home-brewed, lightly fermented small beer of roots and barks, sassafras and sarsaparilla chief among them, and its shift to a carbonated fountain drink is generally traced to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when bottled and powdered extracts made the flavor a purchasable commodity rather than something dug and boiled. Formulas like this one are why nineteenth-century root beer had no fixed taste: each fountain bought its extract from a different house, and the book gives no maker for the "American Root Beer Extract" it calls for.