Each year, around Halloween, my family and I enjoy making some homemade root beer.
It’s fairly simple. A simple recipe. Water, root beer extract, dry ice, and lots of sugar.
So, I bought the dry ice the same day. I put the rest of the ingredients together and left the dry ice for the kids to throw in the mix. That’s their favorite part.
When I measured out the sugar, I had plenty in the house. I just didn’t have the whole five cups in the kitchen. I had four and nine tenths of a cup.
Instead of opening a new bag of sugar, I looked up on the shelf and saw the two little dishes we keep filled with sugar and salt. The sugar dish is, of course, for adding sugar to our tea or putting on toast or in oatmeal, whatever. So, I reached up and grabbed the dish and added some to the cup which I had already mostly filled with sugar.
We got mixing. The kids helped stir. They had fun playing with the billowy smoke coming out of the big jug, adding the dry ice, and taste testing the root beer. Sure enough, when I tried a taste of it, I immediately knew something was not right. I did not however know what was not right. I tried some more. Then I went back, mentally, through all the steps of making the root beer.
Click! On came the light bulb.
It was SALT!
I mistakenly took the salt dish when I topped off that not-quite-full cup of sugar.
Lesson learned. Salt ruins your root beer. We had to dump the whole batch out.
