Bottling root beer is much more difficult than bottling beer

My fiancé and I are both brewers, and our wedding is coming up very soon. As our wedding favors for our guests we are giving bottles of our light beer, which is one of my favorite recipes. For the children and those who do not drink beer, we are giving out home made root beer. This was our first attempt at brewing root beer, so we were not quite sure what to expect.

Rather than requiring our guests to keep their root beer bottles cold, we decided to force carbonate the root beer. If you use yeast to carbonate the root beer, it will have a tendency to explode if you do not keep the bottle cold. The way that we force carbonated the root beer was to fill up a 5 gallon cornelius keg and put it under pressure. We kept it in the refridgerator so that the root beer would absorb more of the carbon dioxide and made sure that the pressure was kept high for a few weeks.

Normally, when we force carbonate beer in a keg, we leave the beer in the keg and drink it from a tap or a jockey box. Normally when we bottle from a keg, we bottom fill the bottles with flat, warm beer. Trying to bottle the root beer turned out to be a little difficult. Filling the root beer bottles from the bottom just led to a lot of foam and a long, drawn out process. We made a much bigger mess than usual. Instead of filling a bottle, capping it, and moving on to the next bottle, we had to try to spread out our time between 3 to 6 bottles at a time as we waited for the foam to subside.

Because it was so hot in the house last night, we did the bottling in the basement. It made it easy to clean up afterwards and it got us out of the heat for a while. It also meant that after being tired and cranky I did not have to carry the cases of root beer very far because we are storing everything in the basement due to to the heat.

Next time we decide to make root beer, we are going to try top filling the bottles. If that winds up being too difficult, then we will probably give up on the force carbonating and just make a half gallon at a time rather than the 4 gallons that we made for the wedding.