Our first scale up!

Our first scale up and soda party was a success! It featured a lemon-ginger ale; cucumber, lime & sea salt, and a root beer.  No terrible technical issues, no meltdowns and no sick guests.  Weather was beautiful this whole week so it was a tad tough to be indoors all day Saturday peeling 8 pounds of ginger and juicing an insane amount of lemons & limes, but it was worth it.

The first thing we had to do was make the root beer on Friday night... the sheer amount of spices we used made the apartment smell quite wonderful (or as our roommate noted: "even the trash smells good!"). The photos below of the cardamom, star anise, juniper and vanilla don't quite do the aroma justice.

Saturday involved juicing piles of citrus fruits by hand (for some reason we don't own a citrus fruit juicer yet which means Tony and I had to juice the limes & lemons using forks.  

Peeling the 20 cucumbers was much faster

and of course our Ruby 2000 (our little beast) just made quick work of everything, pumping out liters of wonderfully fragrant green liquid.

We spent Saturday evening carbonating the three kegs, attempting to shake all three kegs evenly and learning tricks from various homebrew sites for best carbonation.  The 3 kegs then sat in our gigantic freezer over night.