Brewing your own root beer at home with the
kids is so simple, easy and fun that only
a complete idiot could screw it up.
We 
love giving kits like these to the kids as
gifts and this one which we gave to my oldest
son who's 11 for Christmas, really caught
his eye.
Some people may feel some hesitation about
brewing root beer at home with the kids thinking
that maybe they'll go on to the harder stuff.
I kind of doubt that. Besides that, making
the rootbeer involves lots of measuring, some
scientific principles. Another really good
benefit, it demonstrates to them just how
much sugar goes into soda.
And the kit is extremely simple. All you have
to do is heat up water, add sugar, syrup and
yeast. Bottle it and you can use these little
labels to personalize it. My son loved this
process. As you can see it is the H&W Root
Beer - The Kick Ass Brew.
The yeast kicks in and it carbonates naturally
and you can tell that because the bottle gets
firm except as you can see our bottle never
firmed up. So to help me understand how I
screwed this up we got in contact with Ben.
ben is one of the members of our community.
He's also a master brewer and brewing enthusiast
so he even knows a lot about root beer. So
we decided to Skype him in and try to get
some answers.
Ben: So your yeast died. It could be that
when you added it, how hot was the water when
you added it?
Daddy Clay: It said heat it to 98 degrees
but I just got the hottest water that came
out of the tap.
Ben: So it didn't cool down at all before
you added it?
Daddy Clay: Well 
the 
instructions don't say cool it down.
Ben: Well, the yeast dies if it's over 85
degrees. Now the good news is that you can
remix that yeast up together and add it back
in and it'll work.
