Making Root Beer! / 10-rootbeerstirrer Heather Lawver 6/10/2004

Greg taught me something very interesting about my favorite drink - root beer, he said, is very "insidious." The flavor is so potent that it can seep into various materials, like plastic, and taint anything else that material may touch. Because of this, Greg uses a specific rubber spatula to stir the sugar water, and won't use it for anything else, otherwise if he uses it to stir a stout, for example, that stout will come out with a profound root beer flavor.
Root beer's insidious qualities also cause other problems. Bars have what are called "beer lines", which run from the coolers in the brewery where the beers are stored, out to the taps at the bar. These beer lines are simple plastic tubes that snake through cooled pipes in the floor. Dozens of these plastic tubes provide easy access to dozens of types of beers, but not root beer. Root beer - as well as certain fruit beers - are so insidious that their flavor will seep through their own plastic tube, and sneak their way into the tubes of other beers. If you fill one beer line with root beer, in a bundle of a dozen other lines filled with beer, every other tube will start to stink of root beer. Suddenly, all the beer coming out of the taps will taste strongly of root beer. That stuff's treacherous, which is why Sweetwater Tavern has their own beer line system specifically for the root beer, separated entirely from their other beers in the brewery.