Sugar Rush

Last weekend we traveled to Hometown to visit with grandparents and cousins. The Eastside Crew gathered together on Saturday afternoon to sample several bottles of homemade root beer (a project conceived and made possible by Grandma). Micro brews were made by four groups: Khan, Nightingale, Thumbelina and Gingernut (although Nightingale claims she was out of town when the brewing happened); Grandma, Grandpa, and the Treat; Mike, Tina, and Zeke; and
China and Hikerbabe:



We used kits to make our root beer and the kits made a gallon of root beer each, to be bottled in four, roughly-1-liter-bottles. Thus, we had four gallons of root beer in sixteen brown bottles. Okay, well, 14 bottles. Khan's team interpreted the recipe freely and produced two highly concentrated and delicious bottles.

Mike and I thought that we needed to distinguish ourselves from the crowd, so we added some almond extract to our base batch and then added additional, strange ingredients to two of the bottles. Some of the other teams had the same idea, so instead of four types of root beer in mass quantities, there were seven or eight slightly different flavors of root beer.
I tried to persuade people to consume palate cleansers in between each sampling, but they mostly mocked me and then gave the green apple slices to Thumbelina and Gingernut. Zeke got the celery sticks.

My favorite picture is the one of Grandma, knocking back a chilled mug of root beer while holding a liter bottle in the other hand. Awesome.