Winter Hill Root Brew

In a somewhat surprising move, I recently took my first stab at non-alcoholic brewing. About three weekends ago, KJ and I made a trip to the local home brew store with the intention of attempting to make root beer. This was her idea, so she basically took the lead with most everything, but I was totally on board with the concept. She did most of the research and developed the recipe, borrowing ideas from other concoctions of course, while I lent my relative expertise in the areas of sanitation procedures and determining the ideal temperature for the pitching of the yeast.

As it turns out, root beer takes considerably less time to make than alcoholic beer, mostly owing to the fact that it doesn't have to ferment. The yeast is added for the sole purpose of carbonation, although the combination of yeast and sugar must mean there's at least a little fermentation. Needless to say, the wheels are now spinning inside my head.

We recently tasted our finished product—which we're naming Winter Hill Root Brew after the Somerville neighborhood in which it was made—for the first time, and it was pretty good. Judging by the smells that were emanating from my place during the time since we brewed it, I thought it was going to be much sweeter than it turned out, so we'll have to make some adjustments the next time around. Overall, though, we're fairly pleased with the results.

There is still an update pending on my latest alcoholic brew, for which my brewing partner and I labored over the naming process before finally settling on a moniker. I'm going to save that for a subsequent post, though, as I recently ordered labels and am excited to see how they turn out. I'll include a photo with that update.