The Most American Soft Drink Is Not The One You Think

Next time you’re in the US, go to a diner, or a fast food restaurant, and order a “root beer float.” It’s super-sweet, super-cold, and an American classic: two scoops of vanilla ice cream swimming in a tall, frosty glass of root beer. You might not like your first taste of root beer, but you’ll never forget it.

BACK TO THE ROOTS

Real root beer is brewed like normal beer, but has no alcohol. The key ingredient is the bark of the root of the sassafras tree, which grows only in North America and parts of east Asia. For centuries, American Indians used sassafras root to make a medicinal tea. It was believed to cure everything from arthritis to flatulence to venereal disease. It’s not surprising then that root beer, like Coca-Cola, was invented by a pharmacist. Many American pharmacies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had soda fountains: this was so that customers could enjoy a cold drink while they waited for their medicines to be mixed. Early “sodas” like root beer (1876) and Coca-Cola (1886) combined syrups made from medicinal ingredients with fizzy water, which had also been valued for its health benefits since antiquity.

THE SWEET TASTE OF SUCCESS

A Philadelphia pharmacist, Charles Hires, invented root beer, but entrepreneur Roy Allen first made it a commercial success. In 1919, he sold it to hundreds of people at a parade in California for soldiers returning from World War I. Allen soon opened permanent root beer stands. Here customers could order root beer and hamburgers and eat in the parking lot without leaving their cars. MacDonalds is generally considered the world’s first fast-food chain (the first stand opened in 1940), but Allen founded the A&W restaurant franchise in 1921. You can still drink root beer at hundreds of A&W restaurants across America. There are over 2,000 different root beer brands in the US. Thousands of people brew it as a hobby. Root beer is rare outside of the US and Canada. Its sales account for only 3 per cent of the US market for soft drinks. You can’t drink it every day. The taste is strong, sweet and somewhat like cough medicine or bubble gum. But many people have a special place in their hearts for this funny-tasting, all-American brew.

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Interview: THAT'S COOL!

Hamburgers and Coca Cola have conquered the world, but not all American food and beverage has been so successful. Root beer, for example, is only popular in the United States and Canada. The name is actually misleading, as root beer is a sweet, non-alcoholic drink. Patrick Ryan, an expat who runs two “American Heritage” stores in Germany, admits that Europeans have never really taken to root beer:

Patrick Ryan (Standard American accent): They were fairly amazed, the people that tried root beer, visiting me in the US, that we would actually drink anything like that for refreshment. They could imagine that as being some old-fashioned, say, medicinal drink, but to drink that when you’re thirsty, or to drink that for enjoyment, they were fairly amazed. In particular, they were amazed that one of the favorite ways of drinking it in the US is with vanilla ice cream in it. A root beer float, I think, is very, very typical American, and I found very, very, very few Europeans that actually like it. That’s even more extreme than just plain root beer, taking root beer and actually taking vanilla ice cream and putting it directly in there and drinking it cold.

But he thinks that it is the perfect accompaniment to “fast food”:

Patrick Ryan Typical for root beer would be more casual dining: eating it with burgers, with hot dogs, when you’re out. Typical, when I was a kid, was in a drive-in, not a drive-thru, meaning where you actually drive into the restaurant, and actually eat in your car, rather than driving through and taking everything with. Those are unusual to find in the US, but they still exist. Also very popular with anything on picnics: if you’re having a party in the summer and it’s hot outside, you might serve root beer over ice. Also very typical for restaurants, or fast food stores that specialize in root beer, is that they will actually freeze the mug that you put the root beer in, so it’s not just that it’s filled with ice, to make it cold, but the actual glass or mug that you get it in is actually frozen. It comes directly out of the freezer, and they put the root beer in that so that it stays extra cold. It’s kind of interesting to see how that’s very, very different in the US, compared to other countries. Many other countries drink things more lukewarm, or just slightly cooled: in America, whether it’s beer, or soft drinks, we tend to like it very, very cold.