Oh, and I got more birthday presents a couple of weekend’s ago, and one of them was from my In-Law’s who had made a trip up to a home-brew place and bought a bunch of supplies, including a brew pail with spigot, racking cane and tubing, some Gnome extracts, and a case of bottles!
Quite nice of them all told, though I think I’ll only be able to use the pail for non-root beer brewing given how badly it contaminates everything.
Logged into the Northern Brewer Forum’s for the first time in too long and ran across a Root Beer thread!
Hopefully something comes of my replies to it.
In the meantime, I haven’t gotten around to the yeast test yet. Busy, and lack of motivation. Possibly mixed with some fear of more failure. Hopefully this weekend though.
In the meantime, I did get this link out of that forum thread that is worth reading.
What a weekend! The party on Saturday went really well and we drank a LOT of good soda and it seemed like everyone got a nice sugar buzz going for most of the evening. Thankfully there were only a couple of flavors that were, er, unpalatable.
Unfortunately among them was one of the Journey Foods root beer flavors: Shenandoah Sassafras Root Beer. The problem is not that they use Star Anise as one of the ingredients, it’s that they used a LOT of Star Anise as one of the ingredients. The first comment from someone who tried it was, “Tastes like raisins.” Not that raisins are a bad thing, but it was just a very off taste and not very pleasant.
The other unsuccessful one was the Steap line of sodas. All of them are based on Green Tea, which doesn’t sound like a bad thing until you taste one. Ick. Someone said that their sweetie might like them and so took the rest home to see what happens. Good riddance and I hope they get some enjoyment out of them. I did try both the Cola and the Root Beer and both were pretty disgusting.
OTOH – on the good advice of someone close, I found some Sangria flavored Mexican sodas that were quite good. One of them was mostly grape soda flavored, but the other actually tasted like good sangria, but without the alcohol. [Now I just have to get around to calling her today after I didn't get a chance to this last weekend like I was supposed to. 
] Another really pleasant surprise was the Journey Foods Carribean Creme Soda, which had a very nice flavor of toasted coconut. It tempered the usual oversweet flavor of cream soda very well and was a big hit. I’ll have to stock that in the fridge more often.
I didn’t end up getting either the Boylan’s or the 1919, but I think I more than made up for it with the rest of the selection. I’ll post a link to the picture I took of the entire selection arrayed on the dining room table. The chicken curry turned out really well too (though needed a touch more salt) thanks to the lesson on using chicken thigh meat instead of breast meat I learned a few weeks ago in Chicago.
I’ll try and come up with a revised list of the stuff that I actually did end up getting later this week.
