ROOT BEER IN GRANNY’S BATHTUB
by Carolyn Cramer
Goldwasser Oct. 1, 2026
Yes, I got to help my Granny Annie Langley Naylor make and
bottle root beer. I was 8 years old in 1950 and she was 65 years old. She did
things in an old fashioned (even for then) kind of way. Her cook stove was a
huge cast iron, woodburning stove, (meaning the heat to cook on the top and in
the oven came from pieces of wood burning inside one end of it). Out of the top
of the other end of it rose a curved shiny metal smokestack that fitted tightly
into a hole in the actual brick chimney, thru the kitchen side of the wall.
Next to the smokestack was a cast iron shelf on which a very big tea kettle
sat, keeping water hot.
On the living room side of the wall, there was a heater
which burned “fuel-oil”. It was about
two feet away from the wall and it had a similar smoke- stack that fitted into
a hole on the other side of the same chimney. All the smoke and fumes from both
stoves went out of the brick chimney (which extended several feet above the top
of the roof) up into the sky.
I don’t think there
was a separate water heater in that house. But there was plumbing, and cold
water would flow into the kitchen sink, bathroom sink, and bathtub. The water
in the kettle above the cook stove was always hot, so granny would grab it and
pour some hot water into the cold water in the tub to warm it up enough for us
kids to take a bath. Only on Saturday nights we got baths. Other times we
washed in the sink, with less water.
So how did we make Root Beer? First, you save the glass soda
bottles from last year. Then you gather or buy roots (from which the name root
beer comes). Wintergreen is the only root I remember granny naming, but it
seemed to me there were several different kinds of roots involved. She roasted and boiled the roots to make a
dark brown liquid in a giant pot. Then she added a big bag of sugar and boiled
it some more.
She did tell me how they had dug and roasted chicory roots
to make “coffee” during the Depression – chicory is bitter, and so is dandelion
root, which they may have used for the root beer as well as for the “coffee.”
So, then the bathtub was scrubbed clean and rinsed
well. The stopper was securely put in
place and several gallons of the dark brown, warm sweet liquid were poured into
the tub to ferment for a week or so. She
stirred it every day watching for bubbles to form when it was ready. The root
beer got the bathtub. It was summertime, warm weather, no school, no baths.
Warm weather all day and all night was needed for the fermentation to proceed
properly. So we made root beer in summer.
Next step: last year’s glass bottles were put in the giant
pot covered with water and slowly brought to a boil, to be sterilized. They then cooled, in the water. A funnel and
a ladlecargol helped us fill the sterile bottles, as we sat on thick towels on
the bathroom floor.
We moved to the kitchen table and the heavy steel bottle
capping tool was brought out, as were the many thin discs of soft metal that
would become lids for the bottles.
The bottling tool worked with a handle on a lever, which we
older kids could pull down, to exert force onto the top of the metal disc,
which we had set on top of the full bottle; the bottle was held securely in
place below the lever, by a clamp, which was a part of the boxy form of the
tool. The soft, thin metal disc was
forced over the top of the bottle, bending into a bunch of evenly spaced little
crimps around the edges, holding it securely onto the top of the bottle,
keeping the liquid and the bubbles inside for many months.
Root beer has no alcohol content. It is bitter and sweet and
fizzy and it was considered healthier than regular beer with alcohol in it. And
kids could drink it! My grandparents
were members of the Salvation Army and were against alcohol. My mother was an
officer in the Salvation Army before she married my father. There were no
alcoholic beverages in our house, ever.
I think it is not a coincidence that after I was grown and
married with kids, I studied and learned to make several kinds of fermented
foods: including Kosher dill pickles (lots of bubbles, sour but without vinegar
– just salt, garlic, dill and cucumbers), sourdough bread, raising without
yeast; and Amasake, a drink.
Amasake is made from whole grain glutinous rice cooked soft,
with extra water, and then fermented with koji (a fermentation starter), in a
warm oven, for a couple of days, just long enough to let the starches
(carbohydrates) in the rice chemically change into sugars. It gets stirred from
time to time. The fermentation breaks down the skin of the whole grain, and it
gets mushy and sweet. It can have a similar taste and consistency to a
milkshake if it is pureed and chilled. I helped some macrobiotic folks at the Grainaissance
mochi factory, near Berkeley, make amazake to sell, flavored with cooked fruits
and nut butters. Yes, a good substitute for milk shake.
Quickly stopping the fermentation (by boiling it) prevents
the sugars from progressing to become alcohols. “Amasake” means Sweet Sake. If
you let it ferment past sugars, then you have regular Sake – the Japanese
alcoholic drink.
Miso and soy sauce are made with soybeans and grain,
fermented in the presence of salt, which controls the fermentation. The soy proteins become more accessible,
being already partially digested by the fermentation process. Not just a
flavoring, but they are good high protein foods. And they are an important part
of a vegan macrobiotic diet.
Miso and soy sauce are dark brown, like root beer. And here
I am, many decades later, still involved with dark brown fermented foods! Yesterday, I cooked my breakfast soup with
miso in it. Today I flavored my breakfast porridge with a splash of soy
sauce. Thanks, Granny for teaching me
how to cook and how to grow food in your garden. And for saying grace before
every meal: “Bless this food to our bodies and make us grateful, teach us how
to be kind and to help each other. Amen.”
