Homemade (Root)Beer

Root beer is a delicious beverage. "Delicious beverage" is a category in which I rank only the tastiest of drinks, such as chocolate milk, coca-cola, most fruit juices, and root beer. So, when my roommate, Krsnak, decided to home-brew some root beer, I was all for the idea. He invited a bunch of friends over to help in the process. He also went out and bought two 2-liter bottles of root beer, so he'd have something in which to keep the home-brewed root beer. Clearly, not the greatest of plans. We drank the four liters of root beer in pretty quick fashion. Krsnak then made 4 liters of "instant" root beer. It's not actually called instant root beer, but it only took like five minutes and, compared to the other root beer we made, five minutes is pretty instant. The "instant" root beer was pretty okay. Someone brought ice cream over so we made root beer floats. I'm not sure if, at that point in time, there was a root beer capable of ruining a root beer float. After the "instant" root beer was completed, Krsnak started on the long-term brew. I think the original plan was to have everybody kind of help, but instead, we all sat in my other roommate, Ackman's, room and watched him play NBA 2K12. Honestly, that was probably more entertaining than making root beer. Krsnak still went ahead and made that long-term brew of root beer. Two liters of that stuff is supposed to ferment for 2-3 days. Krsnak was filling a 5-gallon jug. I really don't feel like doing math right now, and nobody did then, either, so we just decided that letting it ferment for two weeks would probably suffice. Well, four days later, Krsnak figured that he had waited long enough, and decided to unseal the fermenting root beer and see how it tasted. I helped him open it. We smelled it. It didn't really smell like root beer. At that point, Krsnak became a little hesitant to taste it. I, however, had just gotten home from playing basketball, and was thirsty for pretty much anything and said I'd try it. And by "try it" I apparently meant "fill a giant glass to the brim and chug it." It tasted like beer. Not root beer - beer beer. Now, I'm about the farthest thing from a beer connoisseur one can possibly be, but I know what beer tastes like, and it tastes like what this root beer tasted like. Well, kind of. This root beer tasted like the lightest light beer known to man mixed with water, in which two drops of root beer had been added. So it was established that this root beer was not good. Remember before when I mentioned that there wasn't a root beer "in that point in time" that could ruin a root beer float? This root beer could definitely ruin a root beer float. Krsnak thought that meant we should keep it, though, so he found two gallons of water and dumped them down the drain so we could keep the root beer. What? Yeah. I died a little inside. I know you can get water from any faucet, but to sacrifice two gallons of store-bought water to save two gallons of home-brewed nasty? That's unheard of!

A couple weeks later, nobody in our house had touched the root beer in our fridge. I was thirsty, though, and had forgotten how bad it was. "Surely it wasn't that bad where I'd never drink it again!" I thought. So, I opened up one of the jugs, poured another huge glass of root beer, and chugged. Surprisingly, it hadn't improved in flavor since it last touched my lips. Realistically, it probably had gotten worse. And that was the last time I ever drank root beer. Or beer beer. I guess I'm not sure what that actually was...