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Hard Root Beer

Your wholesome childhood crush.
All grown up and ready for some fun.

History

Sassafras root beverages were made by Native Americans for culinary and medicinal reasons before the arrival of Europeans in North America, but European culinary techniques have been applied to making traditional sassafras-based beverages similar to root beer since the 16th and 17th centuries. Root beer was sold in confectionery stores since the 1840s, and written recipes for root beer have been documented since the 1860s. It is possible that it was combined with soda as early as the 1850s, and root beer sold in stores was most often sold as a syrup rather than a ready-made beverage. The tradition of brewing root beer is thought to have evolved out of other small beer traditions that produced fermented drinks with very low alcohol content that were thought to be healthier to drink than possibly tainted local sources of drinking water, and enhanced by the medicinal and nutritional qualities of the ingredients used. Beyond its aromatic qualities, the medicinal benefits of sassafras were well known to both Native Americans and Europeans, and druggists began marketing root beer for its medicinal qualities.

Pharmacist Charles Elmer Hires was the first to successfully market a commercial brand of root beer. Hires discovered his root tea made from sassafras in 1875, debuted a commercial version of root beer at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, and began selling his extract. Hires was a teetotaler who wanted to call the beverage "root tea". However, his desire to market the product to Pennsylvania coal miners caused him to call his product "root beer" instead. In 1886, Hires began to bottle a beverage made from his famous extract. By 1893, root beer was distributed widely across the United States. Non-alcoholic versions of root beer became commercially successful, especially during Prohibition.

Not all traditional or commercial root beers were sassafras-based. One of Hires's early competitors was Barq's, which began selling its sarsaparilla-based root beer in 1898 and was labeled simply as "Barq's". In 1919, Roy Allen opened his root beer stand in Lodi, California, which led to the development of A&W root beer. One of Allen's innovations was that he served his homemade root beer in cold, frosty mugs. IBC is another brand of commercially produced root beer that emerged during this period and is still well-known today.

Safrole, the aromatic oil found in sassafras roots and bark that gave traditional root beer its distinctive flavour, was banned for commercially mass-produced foods and drugs by the FDA in 1960. Laboratory animals that were given oral doses of sassafras tea or sassafras oil that contained large doses of safrole developed permanent liver damage or various types of cancer. While sassafras is no longer used in commercially produced root beer and is sometimes substituted with artificial flavors, natural extracts with the safrole distilled and removed are available.

About Us

Umlaut Brewing was formed in Chicago in 2003. Early brewing recipes included Plan B English Ale, Black Hole Licorice Stout, and Catholic Schoolgirl Hard Cider.

Hard Root Beer was a natural next step for Umlaut Brewing. Your wholesome childhood crush is all grown up and ready for some fun!

scampbell at hammerbeam dot com 773-369-2127