Dry ice Root Beer a fun and easy Halloween treat!

One of our most beloved family Halloween traditions is our homemade root beer. When the older siblings grew up in Utah, our elementary school had an amazing Halloween party. The kids would dress up and walk from class to class in their costumes. To this day that elementary school still has the Halloween parade. Another great part of the celebration was a party. The room mothers would always make root beer with dry ice! This is such a fond memory for us. And it couldn't be easier to make! You only need a few ingredients:

• Water
• Sugar
• Dry Ice (This is a little tricky and has to be handled with care, plus you have to be over 18 to buy it)
• Root Beer Concentrate (which you find at any grocery store)

Anything that comes with a big warning sign is going to provide for some good fun;) Our little disclaimer is that you need to read the warning and take heed of it. When you serve this up, you want to make sure you don’t serve up a piece of dry ice, no matter how fun it seems. No mouth burns for you!

A hundred years ago, when we were in elementary school we could buy the root beer flavoring in a powder packet right next to the Kool-aid. But now we are only able to find it easily in the baking area as concentrate.

In a large bowl, mix together the water, root beer concentrate and the sugar (there are plenty of recipes online, although you can just add ingredients to taste as well Here is a good resource we found with a recipe) You can use this as an exercise in chemistry if your kids are geeky like ours;)

We mixed our root beer in a large punch bowl. We placed it carefully into a large black cauldron to get a more Halloweeny feel. We had a large chunk of dry ice so we put some bowls in smaller cauldrons with just water in them for the foggy effect.

Finally just add in the dry ice (while wearing gloves!) And let it bubble and fizz away. You only have to wait a few minutes before you can start serving it up! If you want your root beer more carbonated, you need to use a lid after you put in the dry ice. Be careful not to let the pressure build up too much. Our kids were too excited to wait for it to get very carbonated. We also added a few small pieces of the dry ice to the small containers with water at this point.

See what I’m talking about? Halloweeny! Enjoy and don’t forget to let us know if you try this yourselves. It really does add that wow factor to parties.

Erika