Journal, Day 1551

Monday, 17 June 2024

Ukraine War: Day 846

Hamas-Israel War: Day 253

Mass shootings in the USA in 2024: 230

National Root Beer Day

I got an email from the National Day Calendar website saying that today was National Root Beer Day.

I was catapulted back 50 years to my favourite family tradition. Every spring, usually in late April or early May, my whole family would get together on a Sunday evening and retreat to the cool shadowed basement to cook up a batch of homemade root beer.

Amidst the washer and dryer and the gigantic concrete wash sink that was bolted to the cement wall, Dad would bring out the cases of empty glass bottles, our huge 10-gallon pickling crock, the hoses, and the bags of shiny new bottle caps, and lay them out on the cement basement floor. Mom would fill the sink with scalding hot water and all the bottles went in the bath to clean out any bacteria (and possibly spiders), and my brothers and I would put them on the drying rack that dad made out of a plank with a forest of wooden dowels growing out of it.

Meanwhile, dad made the root beer. He filled the crock with water, sugar, real root beer extract, and active yeast, then he mixed it all up with a huge wooden spoon. It took about a half hour, stirring slowly, for all the sugar to dissolve. By then the bottles would be dry.

Dad used a red rubber piece of tubing to siphon the root beer into the bottles, making sure to leave a space for “growing room” at the top. He then handed the filled bottle to me so I could carefully place one of the bottle caps on top, and I’d hand it to my oldest brother so he could use the long-handled bottle cap crimper to seal it tight. Then my middle brother would take the filled, sealed bottle, wipe it off with a towel and place it back in the wooden crate. After an hour, we had about 100 newly-minted bottles of homemade root beer, give or take a few, lined up in the crates like little brown soldiers.

While Mom cleaned out the pickle crock in the big sink, Dad and us three kids would nestle the cases of root beer in the dark, cool space beneath the stairs in the basement and cover them up with a furniture blanket to catch any glass if one of the bottles should burst. We always lost a few, and sometimes we would hear one blow if we were in the kitchen when it exploded.

There they sat for 30 days in the dark so the yeast could ferment and make the fizz. (No mean feat in Colorado, where the altitude could cause cakes to bake flat like goopy chocolate tortillas.)

The day after school let out for the summer in early June, Dad would wake early and take out six bottles and sneak them into the back of the refrigerator. We would have a great feast that lasted all day, with roasted chicken, potato salad, and fresh corn on the cob from the local farmer who sold it ‘thirteen-ears-for-five-bucks’ from a rickety stand right on the edge of his cornfield. We would make hand-cranked ice cream in the afternoon, and have watermelon-seed spitting contests in the back yard.

Dad would take the train out of its shed where it slept through the long winter and spend the day tinkering and adjusting the engine and sending us kids out to clear any grass clumps from the train tracks. He would never let it run on that first day – he just took it out so he could check it over and get us kids excited about it all over again. The first ‘train day’ always came later.

When the sun was going down and the fireflies were just starting to spark little wavering spotlights in the trees, Dad would bring out the ancient, thick art-glass mugs filled with scoops of the homemade ice cream, and with much fanfare and anticipation, he would open that first bottle of root beer. It was always a tense moment… would it be fizzy and foamy or would it be flat?

But always, with a satisfying pop, the bottle cap would go flying, we all cheered, and Dad would pour the root beer over the ice cream in each mug, insert a long-handled sundae spoon and a long straw, and the five of us would enjoy the rewards of our labours in the summer grass. We always agreed it was the best batch of root beer ever.

And thus, Summer officially began.