Coffee Root Beer

Coffee root beer is a creation of my younger days, working long hours (or what seemed to me at the time to be long hours) at a barbeque restaurant as a dishwasher. Our benefits package included run of the soda fountain (barring unreasonable abuse). This is the time when black coffee, in copious quantity, became a staple beverage of mine, but I also concocted a somewhat unique beverage that was a little more thirst quenching than a slug of day-old cold coffee, but still with a bit of extra caffeine kick for those long evenings .

There is nothing complex to the making of coffee root beer; it is as simple as it sounds, with a variable ratio depending on taste. I like a ratio of three parts root beer, 1 part good black coffee. One is best off chilling the coffee before adding it to the root beer, and never (as I did) try to funnel hot coffee into a 2-liter almost full of root beer. This will release all the carbonation into foam, and generally make a mess.

The resulting coffee root beer has the bitterness and flavour of the coffee balanced by the nutty sweetness of the root beer. Coca-Cola's "Blak" product was an annoying preemption of my idea, marketed towards the energy drink crowd and ridiculously overpriced. But simple, humble coffee root beer is an excellent drink.