Did you know root beer was made by a man who hated beer, and its main ingredient was banned in 1960?
Charles Hires was a devout teetotaler who genuinely believed alcohol was destroying American society. On his honeymoon in New Jersey in 1875, he tasted an herbal tea made from roots and berries by a farmer's wife and had an idea. This was the drink that could replace beer. He spent a year perfecting a recipe from sixteen roots, berries, and herbs, including sassafras, sarsaparilla, wintergreen, ginger, vanilla, and birch bark, packaged it into a 25-cent powder packet that made five gallons of root beer at home, and walked into America's biggest party.
The 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition celebrated 100 years of the United States and drew 10 million visitors over six months. Hires handed out free glasses to anyone who walked past his booth. It was an extraordinary product launch.
Then Russell Conwell, the founder of Temple University and a prominent Philadelphia figure, pulled him aside and told him that calling it root tea was a mistake. Pennsylvania coal miners would never drink something called tea. Call it root beer, and they will drink it instead of actual beer. Hires, who despised beer and everything it represented, renamed his temperance drink "root beer" specifically to compete with the very thing he was trying to eliminate. When temperance critics later complained that the word beer made it sound alcoholic, Hires had it laboratory tested and announced publicly that a glass of his root beer contained less alcohol than a loaf of bread. By 1891, he was selling over a million bottles a year.
Sassafras was the heart of the flavor, the ingredient that defined every bottle of Hires Root Beer from 1876 until 1960, 84 years of continuous production. Then the FDA banned safrole, the active compound in sassafras, because it caused liver cancer in laboratory rats. The drink that was supposed to be the healthy alternative to alcohol had been built around a carcinogen the entire time. The original flavor of Hires Root Beer has been legally impossible to recreate commercially since 1960. Every bottle of root beer sold today tastes different from every bottle sold before 1960. The drink that 10 million people tasted at the Centennial Exposition in 1876 no longer exists in any commercially available form within the US.
I am planning to make the original 1876 home-brew version using safrole-free sassafras extract and the documented fermentation method Hires used before commercial carbonation existed, then taste it against a modern brand to show you exactly what 64 years of FDA regulation tastes like.
-Donnie