Friday, December 12, 2008

Cool or Nerdy....or both....

Have you ever made root beer? It is really easy.....if you have dry ice.... yes dry ice.

So the other day we got a shipment of some food and in the bottom was some dry ice. That triggered "root beer" in my mind. I made root beer once before when I was teaching HS and it was really cool. So I said to Kevin...lets try it.

Here is what you need:
1 gallon water
1 pound of sugar
1 oz of root beer extract
1 pound of dry ice


First mix the water, sugar, and extract.....it will be really dark brown...



Add the dry ice.....

Start to watch the magic (I think this would be really cool at a Halloween Party)










Put a lid on it and wait about 45 min to an hour.....

Yes there is some chemistry involved....here is what I found online for why it works and carbonates the soda: Henry's law says that the greater the pressure of the gas above a liquid the more gas will dissolve in the liquid. Soda is carbonated by dissolving carbon dioxide at high pressures into the soda mix. In this demo you use the sublimation of dry ice (-109°F) to obtain the carbon dioxide gas. You need to partially (but to be safe not totally) contain the gas to build up the gas pressure and force more CO2 into the root beer mix.

It is really cool and you can hear it bubbling....









Pouring the final product...




Nothing like root beer in a frosty mug!!!




Kevin enjoyed the final product......




This was a fun evening, and it actually turned out really well.






3 comments:

Crystalsea said...

That looks like a ton of fun! Never thought that's how you can make root beer. ---AW

Steve said...

What a blast you guys. My family made root beer at grandpa and grandma's house in the summer sometimes. Combine that with hand crank, home made ice cream and a kid was a close to heaven as you can get.

Thanks for the explanation, I always wondered how it worked.

US

Kevin DeKorte said...

Uncle Steve, I agree that having this with some vanilla ice cream would have been great. But we didn't have any at the time, and the root beer made this way goes flat pretty fast. So we didn't get to have root beer floats with it.