When I was a boy a bottle of pop cost ten cents. Added to that was a deposit for the bottle of two or three cents if you took the bottle with you. Most pop at that time was sold in bottles so pop bottles were common and, in fact, many people who bought pop would just throw away the bottle when it was empty. Sometimes when we needed a little cash, we would walk around town looking for empty pop bottles and turn them in at the store for the deposit money.
Some bottles were the wrong kind and were not accepted for a deposit refund. We kept those bottles at home and used them each summer when we made HOMEMADE ROOT BEER! Almost every summer from the time I was very small to when I was in high school, my family made a batch of homemade root beer at least once each summer. Usually the making of the root beer was timed so that the root beer would be ready to drink about the Fourth of July.
Each year Mom and Dad purchased a box of new bottle caps from either one of the bottling companies in Holbrook or through the Sears & Roebuck Catalogue. We had a small machine for pressing the caps onto the bottles to seal them. I assume it was called a “bottle capper.”
The process for making homemade root beer had several steps. The first thing to be done was to wash all of the empty pop bottles we had collected. They were all from obscure or obsolete brands, but we didn’t care. They all had to be washed and that was done in a couple of large wash tubs on the back porch. One had soap and water and the other was for rinsing off any remaining soap so that we had completely clean bottles. We kept the supply of empty bottles in the wash house and used them each year but each year they had to be washed.
After the bottles were clean, we had to mix up the root beer. We bought “Hires Root Beer Extract” at the store. At that time it was available in many stores. The other ingredients were sugar, water and yeast. As I recall, we used about five gallons of water, about five pounds of sugar and I don’t remember how much yeast. The water had to be warm to activate the yeast to get the fizz.
The next step was to fill the bottles. Early on we used to fill the bottles with a cup or dipper and a funnel but in doing so we spilled a lot down the side of the bottle so all the bottles had to be washed off after they were bottled. Later when we got the milk separator, it had a large bowl that had a spigot on it and it was ideal for filling pop bottles. We filled the big bowl with root beer and dispensed it into the bottles without spilling any at all. We had to be sure to leave at least an inch of space between the top of the liquid and the bottle cap.
After the bottles were filled, they were capped. The capping operation took at least two people but usually when we got ready to make root beer, we had lots of friends around to help so manpower was not a problem. One person would put the cap on the bottle and the other would press down on the capper to squeeze the bottle cap edges around the lip of the pop bottle. It took a little skill to get the cap on straight so there was a good seal but we mastered that pretty quickly.
Bottles that had been capped were placed, lying on their sides, in crates or lug boxes. The boxes were then stored under Mom and Dad’s bed. The usual brewing time was about two weeks. After about a week and a half had passed, we started to pester Mom and Dad to let us open a bottle of root beer to see if it was “ready”. The root beer was taken out from under the bed and a bottle was selected. The yeast had always settled to the bottom (side) of the bottle since it was lying on its side. We could get rid of the yeast by shaking the pop before opening it. Almost always, the pop was not ready and had no fizz. When it finally was ready, it had a pretty good fizz, but we had usually drunk several bottles before that trying it out.
Once it was ready, it was a case of drinking it as fast as we could because if it got too much fizz, it wasn’t very good. We always were afraid it would pop the caps off if it got too old, but I don’t know whether or not that would have really happened. I don’t remember it ever happening but we had usually consumed it all well before it would have been that old.
Once it was ready, bottles were stood up on end and we always had a bunch of bottles in the refrigerator. Anytime we wanted a bottle of pop, we could help ourselves. We drank it like we would never have another bottle of pop in our lives. Because of the yeast, it had a slightly different taste than root beer bottled with carbon dioxide but we didn’t complain. We looked forward each year to the Homemade Root Beer!