Brewing your own root beer can be great Quality Time. In this episode, Daddy Clay tells us about his not so successful attempt at homebrewing rootbeer with his son. To figure out what went wrong, we've brought in home brew enthusiast, father of two, and the unofficial Mayor of DadLabs, Ben. He offers tips and tricks on how to brew your own soda. Learn which brewing supplies you'll need - from extract to bottles. Join the conversation on our forums at DadLabs.com where you can get more of your home brewing questions answered. DadLabs. Ep. 599 is brought to you by BabyBjorn.

Brewing your own root beer at home with the kids is so simple, easy and fun that only a complete idiot could screw it up.

We love giving kits like these to the kids as gifts and this one which we gave to my oldest son who's 11 for Christmas, really caught his eye.

Some people may feel some hesitation about brewing root beer at home with the kids thinking that maybe they'll go on to the harder stuff. I kind of doubt that. Besides that, making the rootbeer involves lots of measuring, some scientific principles. Another really good benefit, it demonstrates to them just how much sugar goes into soda.

And the kit is extremely simple. All you have to do is heat up water, add sugar, syrup and yeast. Bottle it and you can use these little labels to personalize it. My son loved this process. As you can see it is the H&W Root Beer - The Kick Ass Brew.

The yeast kicks in and it carbonates naturally and you can tell that because the bottle gets firm except as you can see our bottle never firmed up. So to help me understand how I screwed this up we got in contact with Ben. ben is one of the members of our community. He's also a master brewer and brewing enthusiast so he even knows a lot about root beer. So we decided to Skype him in and try to get some answers.

Ben: So your yeast died. It could be that when you added it, how hot was the water when you added it?

Daddy Clay: It said heat it to 98 degrees but I just got the hottest water that came out of the tap.

Ben: So it didn't cool down at all before you added it?

Daddy Clay: Well the instructions don't say cool it down.

Ben: Well, the yeast dies if it's over 85 degrees. Now the good news is that you can remix that yeast up together and add it back in and it'll work.