How do you make root beer?
Eva Duckler: It’s really simple. You just steep out a bunch of herbs using water extraction. I don’t use any extracts except for vanilla extract. It’s all extracted in-house. Then you caramelize some sugar and add some honey, and that’s what you get. And then you carbonate it in a keg. Sarsaparilla is the classic root beer flavor. But a lot of vanilla is really important. A lot of people feel strong about using anise, so there’s a little anise, but that wasn’t a flavor that I always loved when I was trying them, so I got to customize it to my taste.
The flavor is really layered and balanced: a lot of herbal kick to it, but it’s balanced by a rich, full sweetness and really different from mainstream root beers.
It’s crazy different. If you tried it side-by-side with other root beers, it wouldn’t taste anything like them. We don’t use any artificial flavors or colors or high fructose corn syrup to sweeten it. It’s like what I’d like to think root beer tasted like back at its origins in the 1800s, when people were just drinking it made from roots, or fermented and alcoholic. It’s really different from what you’d expect, but it has the herbal notes you might expect from any major brand.
