Extracting Safrole to Make Government-Banned Root Beer

hey everyone welcome back to lab coats so I feel like I've shared quite a bit about myself on this channel like my name my hometown my face but one thing that I've never shared before is that I have a very serious addiction to root beer I love the stuff seriously I've tried so many varieties that's borderline obsession but a while ago I learned something about my favorite beverage that made me just a little sad modern root beer is no longer made from Roots or even the main ingredient from the roots that originally gave it its

flavor you see old-fashioned root beer was essentially a fizzy sweetened tea made from the roots of the sassafras tree which is loaded with a sweet smelling oil called saffron this was the key flavoring agent for hundreds of years until the government stepped in in the United States Safra was banned from being used in food products because in high doses it can apparently cause health issues in Lab Rats and when I say high doses I mean really high doses like the equivalent to what you get from drinking more than 30 bottles of soda in a single

day and while later studies did conclude the safrochem used safely as a flavoring agent the U.S still hasn't reinstated the compound as a legitimate food additive so if you want to experience the original flavor root beer without traveling to Europe your only option is to extract the saffron yourself and make your own soda so naturally that's exactly what I set out to do before I could start though I first had to get myself some Sassafras root now while you can purchase Sassafras in some stores it's basically impossible to get with the saffron still in it

so really it's best to just dig up the roots for yourself thankfully this wasn't actually too difficult for me to do I live in an area where wild sassafras is fairly common so during a visit to my family's Lake cabin I took the opportunity to look for some in their nearby woods and luckily I found some almost immediately sassafras is fairly easy to identify thanks to its iconic leaves which are typically shaped like either mittens or duck feet so as soon as I spotted some I went to work yanking a few up it took a

while but in the end this is what I got so now the big question how do you get the saff roll out of the root well interestingly there are a few options for one we could simply perform a solvent extraction using something like acetone or dichloromethane this method is certainly viable but it probably wouldn't be the best for what I'm doing even the best solvents have trouble pulling out all the saferol and there's also the possibility that they would take up some other less desirable compounds and of course there's also the risk that some of

the solvent could remain in the file product which isn't the best for something that I'm planning to use in food on the other hand steam distillation is an option that is not only cleaner but also somewhat easier for this you simply chop up whatever you want to extract mix it with water and to slot the oil without any of the non-volatile junk or toxic solvents pretty nice right of course before wearing the distillation I had to prepare the sassafras root since most of the oils are in the outer layers of the root bark this is

the part most people focus on so with a knife I stripped each root of its bark continuing into the smell saffron was no longer present in the peelings from my sample I ended up with about 85 grams of usable sassafras which was added to a blender with some water breaking up the root is good for saffron recovery but it's important not to blend everything into a paste since that could lead to scorching on the flask bottom once the blending was done the resulting SAS fresh mixture was added to a 500 milliliter boiling flask with a

bit of extra water and the distillation was carried out I tried tossing a stir bar to help everything boil smoothly but there was a bit too much sass for us for this to work effectively as things began to boil a murky liquid could be seen collecting in the condenser head and once the liquid made to the receiving flask a heavy oily substance began separating from the water this oil is mostly saffron along with a few other compounds from the sassafras like pinene and eugenol and let me tell you this stuff smelled amazing as it was

distilling in case it wasn't obvious based on what I'm making this stuff smells almost exactly like root beer tastes although more natural and a bit like turpentine probably thanks to the traces of piney and collected alongside it it took several hours and a few more additions of boiling water but in the end I had a whole flask full of saffron water since saffron is denser than water most of it sank to the bottom of the flask and I used a separatory funnel to isolate it I also tried crushing up more of the oil with salt

but surprisingly that really didn't work I'm guessing there was just too much water present for it to effectively separate I could have done solvent extraction with something like ether or DCM but that honestly seemed like more effort than it was worth so getting back to my sample the next thing I had to do is purify it close to the end of the distillation I scorched some of the sassafras which led to the sample taking on a slight yellow color so I prepared a few milliliters of aqueous sodium hydroxide and added it to my contaminated saffron

typically this is done to pull out the eugenol but I was kind of hoping you would also take care of the color and slightly off smell and lo and behold it actually did the upper aqueous layer became a noticeable shade of yellow and the saffron seemed noticeably cleaner so I washed the oil a few times with water and finally dried it over a small amount of calcium chloride in the end I came out with about two milliliters of nice and clear saffron this means that roughly three percent of the weight of my Sassafras root was

saffron which is right around the expected amount not exactly a ton of material but still plenty for what I had planned all right that was my very first steam distillation and honestly I don't think it came out half bad this is about two milliliters of saffron which I collected from the sassafras and that should be way more than enough to make the root beer that I'm planning on drinking but only time will tell if that's going to be any good so let's get into it to make my root beer I'll just be creating a simple

syrup with all the ingredients and mixing with off-the-shelf club soda to give it the required Fizz and speaking of ingredients they are as follows 160 grams of sucrose 470 milliliters of water 15 milliliters of 40 millimolar ventiline solution 2 milliliters of 45 millimolar citric acid solution one milliliter of anathol and approximately 100 microliters of saffron translate it back to English that comes out to roughly 3 4 of a cup of sugar two cups of water a tablespoon of vanilla extract a half teaspoon of lemon juice a quarter teaspoon of anise or licorice extract and three

drops of our sassafras oil I also chose to add red and green food dyes to give my foul product that rich brown root beer color they were all used to to get started I filled a small saucepan with the water and then measured out the sugar personally I went with a 50 50 mix of brown sugar and white sugar since brown sugar has a more Dynamic caramely flavor that works well with the root beer this was added to the water and mixed well until dissolved turns out I didn't actually need the saucepan since all the

sugar went into solution relatively quickly without Heating so moving on I next add the vanilla lemon juice and anise extract along with a pinch of salt now I know at this point some of my fellow rooper connoisseurs are probably showing up their screens Zach where's the Wintergreen that's actually a good question sadly I didn't have any but believe me I would have added it along with the other flavors if I had some like licorice or anise Wintergreen is one of those underlying flavors in root beer that you don't realize belongs there until it's not present

forgetting it wasn't the end of the world but after comparing my root beer to the commercial stuff I could definitely tell it was missing now at this point the only other component that need to be added was a saff roll and believe me I was very careful about how much I put in based on the ld50 saffron may seem fairly safe with it apparently taking more than an ounce to risk fatally poisoning someone of my size however some other records claim they can take as little as five milliliters to kill you which makes saffron sound

more like cyanide than a flavoring agent however it's important to remember that this is around the same level of toxicity as wintergreen oil which is ingested safely by millions of people every day still there was no way I was going to use my entire two milliliter sample so I settled on using the maximum amount that would dissolve in water which ended up being around three drops once the saffron was added I poured everything into a jar and shook the mixture vigorously until I had a nice homogeneous syrup then I added a few drops of red

and green food color and with that my old-fashioned root beer syrup was done so now to complete my journey and finally make my own root beer all that was left was to add the Fizz and for that I used the club soda I mentioned earlier personally I went a little heavier on the syrup to mimic a more traditional root beer flavor and I ended up adding about one part syrup to two part soda on Ice of course however if you are into the sweetness of the store-bought stuff using three parts soda water might be preferable

regardless here was my first experience tasting authentic saffron based root beer all right here we are got our homemade root beer made from the saffron that we extracted from sassafras see how it tastes tastes like root beer but I will say it doesn't taste exactly like a name brand root beer like a w or something it tastes more like uh soda you get from a like a soda shop or something like that it's definitely not bad but it is more natural and herbal which makes sense I mean came from saffron from a plant overall I

would give this a 7 out of ten honestly I mean if you were to serve this to me at a party or a restaurant I probably wouldn't even be able to tell the difference between it and just an ordinary root beer so I call it a success all right not surprisingly saffron containing root beer actually tastes quite similar to the modern off-the-shelf stuff that was made to mimic it granted it's not 100 there but for something that I came up with on my own I'd say it turned out pretty well it might not be made

from paint thinner or plastic gloves but by golly I made a sew from a questionable chemical precursor and by some miracle it didn't suck and that is good enough for me although if I were to do it again I would add lesson these and definitely include Wintergreen now before I conclude this video I actually have something personal to talk about this is my younger sister Mariah and she loves to write in recent times she has had some struggles with her mental health and those struggles inspired her to write a fictional book titled add Bellum in

this book she personifies the issues she and others have faced as monsters that the protagonist must face and knowing what she's been through I'm very proud of the work she's done so to help her out I'll be posting a link in the video description to her monthly email newsletter by signing up you'll be helping Mariah achieve her goal of self-publishing at Bellum which she hopes will go on to positively impact others who face similar mental health problems and if you sign up you'll also get access to her free flash fiction ashes again the links are

down below alright as usual I'd like to thank you all very much for watching and encourage you to subscribe so you don't miss out on the crazy stuff I have planned I'm currently working on everything from Tesla coils to death Rays along with a lot of awesome chemistry projects so make sure you stick around for the fun if you'd like to help support projects like this I highly recommend joining my patreon and speaking of I'd be remiss if I didn't thank all the existing lab coats patrons without their support plenty of my projects wouldn't be

anything more than ideas so I'm truly grateful for their monthly contributions remember to like share and subscribe and I'll catch you next time lab coats out