Root beer was named to sell to coal miners by a teetotaller
Charles Hires, a Philadelphia pharmacist who never drank, wanted to call his sassafras drink root tea. But he hoped to sell it to Pennsylvania coal miners, and tea would not do. So the word beer went on the label, and one of North America's most distinctive soft drinks got its misleading name.
Long before Hires, Americans were drinking root beer, at least as far back as the 1700s. It began as a small beer, lightly fermented, flavoured mainly with the root bark of the sassafras tree or with sarsaparilla vine. Recipes were being written down by the 1830s, confectioners sold it from the 1840s, and in the 19th century people often drank it hot, as a remedy. Native Americans and Europeans alike prized sassafras for its supposed healing powers, and druggists marketed the drink accordingly.
Hires created his root tea in 1875, showed a commercial root beer at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 and sold the extract before bottling a ready drink in 1886. By 1893 it was sold nationwide, and alcohol-free versions boomed during Prohibition. Competitors followed. Barq's, launched in 1898, relied on sarsaparilla and is unusual for containing caffeine, about 1.8 mg per fluid ounce. In 1919 Roy Allen opened a stand in Lodi, California, served his brew in frosted mugs, and so started what became A&W.
A health finding reshaped the recipe. Safrole, the aromatic oil behind sassafras's flavour, caused liver damage and cancers in laboratory animals given large doses, and the US Food and Drug Administration banned it from mass-produced foods in 1960. Since then commercial makers have used artificial flavouring or sassafras extract with the safrole removed.
The famous foamy head once came naturally from the slippery, mucilaginous sassafras bark and from fermentation. Modern makers use carbonated water and add yucca, soy protein or a little starch to recreate the froth. Home brewers once let a molasses syrup ferment with yeast for 12 hours, producing a drink of 2 percent alcohol or less. Root beer is now bottled in Canada and every US state, and Wisconsin Dells opened a museum devoted to it in 2021.
Source: Root beer
