Root Beer Baby Back Ribs

If you click on my "Cooking with Soda" tag, you'll see I've often done pork roasts and/or beef roasts with Sprite or cola or root beer. But over the last year or 2, I've been using root beer to help finish off my pork rib recipe.  I start by following this recipe all the way through the dry rub and instant pot cooking (I'm not an instant pot freak, but I use it when it can be helpful).  But then when it says to finish under the broiler, I jump outside to my grill instead. 

I add some BBQ sauce and a little honey, and I get just a little char forming on both sides (I like just a little char). And then I douse it all in a little root beer.

Here was the scene last night when I did some ribs for supper:

Root beer ready to help finish these ribs.

Pouring on a little extra sweetness.

Root beer pooling on the "bone" side of the ribs. It stayed nicely, and I closed the lid for a few minutes.

After grilling both sides, I wrapped it tight with foil and poured some extra root beer in there as well.

Back in the house, I opened it after 45 mins after it absorbed some juices/BBQ/root beer.
The dry rub is tasty, and the root beer adds to it! Ready to fall off the bone.

A meal of root beer ribs, cheesy garlic bread, jalapeño poppers, and apples. NICE!

My boys like this a lot too! We had 2.5 lbs of ribs, and we had 0 left overs.

Black Bear Root Beer

My wife was walking through Menards last week and picked up a 4-pack of these for me:

 

Brand: Black Bear Root Beer.

Origin: Glendale, WI.

Purchase Place: Menards, St. Paul, MN.

Sweetener: Glucose Syrup.

Review: This is a different "label" from the Sprecher brand - it's made by them. The label is very simple, nearly laughably plain (look at the "root beer" text at the top and how the "12 FL OZ" is oddly placed within that orange-ish stripe at the bottom.

But onto the flavor: it's decent. It's nothing too special, and it's a bit heavy with a caramel aftertaste. It's pretty smooth with a little hint of wintergreen, but then there's the caramel flavor that's a bit too much. Not bad, but not great. A decent root beer.

Score: 6 out of 10.