Slow Cooker Root Beer Chicken
65 Comments Jun 27, 2024
Updated Jun 27, 2025
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Coming up with an easy dinner for busy nights is easier than ever with this Slow Cooker Root Beer Chicken recipe. It’s a main course dish that adds a fun twist to traditional chicken the whole family is sure to enjoy.
Recipe Highlights
- My Root beer chicken recipe is the perfect mix of sweet, tangy, and savory!
- Only three ingredients and spices!
- The soda tenderizes the chicken while adding a unique flavor.
- It’s easy to toss in the slow cooker, great for sandwiches and more!
Key Ingredients
Chicken: I prefer to use boneless skinless chicken thighs because they are more flavorful and shred just as easily as other chicken cuts.
Barbecue Sauce: Sweet Baby Rays is one of the most popular barbecue sauces used for slow cooking. You can use your favorite barbecue sauce though!
Root Beer: The star of the dish, it goes perfect with bbq sauce!
Seasonings: A combination of onion powder, garlic powder, cayenne pepper, and dried oregano is used to season the chicken prior to cooking.
How to make Root Beer Chicken
- Add chicken, root beer, and barbecue sauce to your slow cooker.
- Let it slow cook until the chicken is fall-apart tender.
- Shred, stir, and serve however you like—on buns, over rice, or straight from the pot!
How to serve
- Use this delicious root beer bbq chicken for sandwiches. You can use hamburger buns, hoagie buns, or even sub bread.
- You can also serve a helping of the root beer chicken over white rice, a bed of mashed potatoes, or on tortilla chips.
- Give your salad a twist by adding some of this chicken on top as well.
- Place any leftover chicken in an airtight container and store in the fridge for up to 3 days.
Sarah’s Tips & Variations
What cuts you can use: You can use almost any cut of chicken for this recipe—drumsticks, boneless or bone-in thighs or breasts, tenderloins, or even wings. If using a whole chicken, make sure it’s fully thawed and cook on low for 8 hours or cooked through.
Frozen chicken? Be sure to thaw your chicken first—frozen chicken is not recommended.
Choosing a root beer: Use any root beer you like! You can use diet root beer if you’re accustomed to the aftertaste.
Added Vegetables: You can add bell peppers and onions for added flavor and texture.
Featured Comment
Love this! I have made this twice and it turns out great
– JV
Slow Cooker Root Beer Chicken
How to Video
Equipment
Ingredients
- 2 lbs. boneless skinless chicken thighs, well trimmed of fat
- ¼ tsp. dried oregano
- ¼ tsp. garlic powder
- ¼ tsp. onion powder
- 1 ½ cups barbecue sauce, I use Sweet Baby Rays Original
- 12 oz. can Root Beer, I use A & W
- ⅛ tsp. cayenne pepper
Instructions
- Add the chicken to the slow cooker.
- Sprinkle over the oregano, garlic powder, onion powder, and cayenne over the chicken
- Pour over the barbecue sauce,
- Pour over the root beer.
- Cover and cook on low for 7 hours.
- Shred chicken with 2 forks and serve over buns or rice.
Nutrition
Nutrition info is auto-generated. This information is an estimate; if you are on a special diet, please use your own calculations.
More Soda and Beer slow cooker recipes:
Dr. Pepper Pulled Pork, Coca Cola Pot Roast, and Root Beer Pulled Pork bring soda-inspired flavor to the slow cooker.
Beer and Garlic Brats, Whole Beer Chicken, and Beer Roast are bold, savory choices for a hearty meal.
Try Dr. Pepper Ribs for a sticky-sweet twist on classic slow cooked ribs.
I was looking for something to cook for a large family for this upcoming Labor Day weekend to test yesterday. I found this recipe and was a bit confused on some of the negative comments but searched on line for comparable recipes and I decided to make this recipe as is with one exception…. I would test it at the 4 hour mark. I used thighs as instructed (just thawed out the Costco ones in the huge bag). This was perfect, delicious and done at the 4 hr. mark per the thermometer. The sauce in there was fine at this point was not thin as others stated.
What I decided to do was to leave this on the warm setting from then on after I shredded it for about 1.5 hrs. longer only because we weren’t ready to eat it. The consistency of the sauce was perfect and I put it on a Brioche bun with the North Carolina coleslaw I made. The recipe I used for coleslaw was a bit tangy alone, but over this chicken it was perfect. It seemed to compliment each other.
In any event this recipe is perfect and I will be doubling it for our huge family this coming weekend. Only difference would be to test it (a solid piece of thigh) at the 4 hr mark as I did – it was just over 165 degrees so then took all the pieces out and shredded it and put back into the slow cooker and reduced the setting to “warm” – and left it there till my husband and I were going to have dinner in an hour and a half. It was perfect but feel it would have been just as good at the 4 hr mark too. But I like the fact I can leave this dish on the warm setting and the plan is to have time to make a few other dishes to go with it. This is a 5 star dish for so many reasons. Just test for the 165 degrees it at the 4 hr mark as I know all slow cookers are different.
The comments are correct: good flavor, very bad proportions, waaaay too long cooking time. Even with 8oz of root beer and BBQ sauce and almost 4lbs of meat there was still alot of runny sauce. I thickened it wit some cornstarch + cold water, that helped. The thighs were done in 4.5 hours on low. This is very similar to “Golfer’s Chicken” (plenty of those recipes around), with better flavor and better measurements.
I’ve got a big bottle of A&W in my refrigeratr and have been trying come up with a recipe for using it in. Can’t tolerate Cayanne Pepper. Does anyone have any suggestions other than brown? Watching my sugar intake and there’s plenty of sweetness in the added ingredients already.
You can skip it.
Can this be done in the instapot?
I don’t see why not!
Can I cook this on high in the crock pot? If I can how long should I cook it for?
4 hours will work great.
Can I use this receipe for Bear loin????
It’s hard to say without trying it first.
7 hours was to long for me! Chicken was over cooked unfortunately
What I did was boil the root beer down to syrup before adding it to the bbq sauce. Just a low bubbling so it doesn’t burn. It was a nice change to bbq chicken and a great way to use up flat root beer.
That is smart!
After looking at comments, I cut back on both BBQ sauce and root beer, using 8 oz of both root beer instead of the 12 oz listed. I also had 3 large chicken breasts weighing almost 3 pounds and figured that would help with the soupiness since there would be almost a third more meat. But it was still verrry runny. I left the lid off for awhile and that helped cook off some of the liquid. The flavor itself was pretty good and I might try it one more time with more meat and at least half the root beer and BBQ sauce. Will update rating/comments if that improves the outcome.
It was ok, but I won’t make it again. Root beer and BBQ sauce kept the chicken moist, but if I made it again I would cut the root beer in 1/2. Was just soupy and tasted too much like root beer. Fairly bland.
This is a fantastic (and easy) recipe! I used Sweet Baby Ray’s Honey BBQ sauce because that was the only SBR at the store. I served it on homemade burger buns (from Mommy Oven, on YouTube) with my husband’s recipe for coleslaw. He couldn’t stop raving about how much he loved it and I absolutely agree.