Root Beer BBQ Sauce

Bad News
To start off I have to report that unfortunately we could not find Hanks Root Beer anywhere in Phoenix. We used to get it at BevMo or AJ’s Fine Foods. The only thing we found was diet Hanks. In my opinion that’s just not root beer.  The good news is that we had other options. We decided to use another one of my favorites: Berghoff Root Beer. Berghoff is another rich flavored brew.

The Setup
1 – 12 fl oz Berghoff Root Beer
Magical ingredients to sauté
Magical base ingredients
Making our sauce is done in two stages. We sauté some of the ingredients and at the same time we mix up the base. After the sauté is done we add the base to the sauté.



Preparation
Using Berghoff in place of Jack Daniels has at least one major benefit: It doesn’t make the entire house smell. The amount of root beer we added was double the normal amount of what we usually add for Jack Daniels. As we sautéed our magical ingredients in Berghoff Root Beer we got the base for our BBQ sauce mixed up and ready to go. Once the sauté was done we poured the base into the sauté and finished the cooking process.

The Taste
Our first impressions about the sauce were positive. Could you taste the root beer? Not really. For our first taste we were under the impression that it tasted exactly like our Jack Daniels BBQ sauce. We decided that it would be a good idea to try the two sauces side by side to see how they compared to each other. When we tried the Jack Daniels sauce we quickly realized that there was a significant difference.

Conclusion
Jack Daniels BBQ sauce has a flavor all to its own; however, our root beer BBQ sauce still turned out to exceed our original expectations. If you are considering using root beer in your own recipe for BBQ sauce we encourage you to give it a try. Don’t expect to be able to taste the root beer, but we think you will be pleasantly surprised at the results.