It’s St. Patricks day this week! And while we don’t drink beer we do enjoy ROOT beer!!! And my favorites? Root beer floats!
Did you know you can make root beer at home? There are a few variations and recipes out there, one is even on the back of the root beer extract recipe. BUT we’re scientists at our house, so we went searching for a version made with dry ice! Fun to make AND fun to drink!
Dry Ice Root Beer
16 C cold water
2 1/2 cups sugar
2 Tbls Root Beer Extract
1 pound dry ice, broken
Stir the cold water and sugar until the sugar is dissolved! This step is the most important, if your sugar isn’t dissolved it will stick to the dry ice in chunks. Once it’s dissolved add the root beer extract and stir it in!
Crush the dry ice, but remember to be careful. Dry ice is fun, but not a toy, you can easily get burned. Use hot pad holders, or thick gloves when touching it. We crushed it in a bag on our wood cutting board with a hammer.
Pour it into the root beer sugar water….
and stir to keep clumps of the dry ice from sticking to the bowl!
The kids LOVED playing with the “smoke” cloud… and we let them stir, supervised of course.
You can see it bubbling away here! keep stirring it until the dry ice has all dissolved.
Then pour into glasses and enjoy!! Ours wasn’t quite as carbonated as store bought root beer, and seemed a tad bit off. Maybe a different brand of extract would be the key, but it was still really fun and the kids loved it!
