Herbs Past and Present by Charles Garcia
Root Beer: The First Herbal Soft Drink
It took several years for me to develop a taste for root beer. Actually I was in my early forties before I truly enjoyed it. What caused this change of taste is difficult to determine, but perhaps age and a longing for a gentler time prompted it. Or maybe root beer just got better.
I remember as a child going to the A&W root beer drive-in in Oakdale. The waitresses glided out on roller-skates and put trays on the open car windows. I noticed they always wore very short dresses. I couldn’t imagine why. I always ordered a hamburger with everything. For some reason I could stomach raw onions on a burger but nothing else. Dad would have root beer with a big foamy head in a cold frosty mug so thick it looked like it could stop a bullet. Sometimes Mom would have a Coke float. I wondered what kind of root they put in root beer. Did they have braceros digging it up somewhere in the desert? I once asked my Dad about that. He laughed and said it used to be a medicine, but everyone liked the taste so they made a soda out of it. He said only Mexicans could find the really good root. I believed him.
Root beer is one of the few soft drinks that has an open history. Whereas the recipes for Dr. Pepper, Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola were and still are held secret, many an early American could brew up a batch of root beer, and did.
Many writers have credited Charles E. Hires as the inventor of root beer, but that’s not quite correct. Long before Mr. Hires started marketing his product various forms of root beer had existed. In fact, root beer dates back to colonial settlers. The colonist had made a beverage known as small beer. This was a normal beer that was drunk soon after bottling, and since fermentation hadn’t progressed much the beer was far less alcoholic than normal beers. A problem the colonist faced was a lack of barley in which to make their beer. This was solved by using anything that would ferment. They soon found that by adding large amounts of sugar (actually molasses) they could get just about anything to ferment. It wasn’t long before they made a small beer out of various local herbs, barks, roots and berries. This was the first root beer.
For many soft drink historians, the true root beer of the American West was sarsaparilla. Though now considered a joke in grade C Western movies, this drink was widely imbibed by cowboys for its ability to soothe burning in the urinary tract. Bouncing in the saddle for weeks at a time and the lures of strange women made a cool glass of sarsaparilla very important to the cowboys.
Although he didn’t invent root beer, Hires did create a drink that completely dominated the market for decades. Charles E. Hires was a Philadelphia pharmacist, and while honeymooning in New Jersey he sampled a great tasting herb tea. When he got back home he began experimenting until he created a similar drink. He called his product “Hires’ Herb Tea.” It wasn’t long before Hires decided that this tea mixture made a great root beer. Sassafras was its main flavoring ingredient. Sassafras had long been the main flavoring ingredient of other root beers that predated Mr. Hires’ product.
He began selling his root beer mixture at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in tiny packets that contained the various herbs, barks, and berries. You still had to boil these ingredients, strain the mixture, add the correct amount of sugar and yeast, ferment the brew, and then bottle it. But you didn’t have to collect the ingredients and purchasing the ingredients in one package was cheaper than buying all of them separately. The pre-mixed ingredients were primarily sold to housewives, but were also marketed to druggists and soda fountains.
In 1880, five years before the invention of Dr. Pepper in Waco, Texas, and six years before the introduction of Coca-Cola in Atlanta, Hires introduced a “new and improved” liquid version that didn’t have to be boiled and strained. It was first advertised in an 1884 issue of Harper’s Weekly. Mr. Hires’ root beer became extremely popular in a very fast way. This can be attributed to the housewives desire to produce a good tasting root beer with a minimum amount of trouble, the pressures of the temperance movement, and the never ending promotion of Mr. Hires.
He gave away gallons of his product to just about everybody he met. One of his most popular giveaways was a trading card that he included with his root beer. These trading cards of exotic locales became very collectible when they were first being given away – not to mention their collectability today. Hires ceramic mugs and the wooden root beer barrel that was seen sitting upon many a soda fountain counters are a couple of other highly collected items. If you have any of these locked in your attic, handed down by your great grand parents, you may have a small fortune in American collectibles.
By 1892 almost three million bottles were being sold each year. For many years Hires Root Beer completely dominated the market but eventually it started seeing some competitors in regional markets. One particular brand that gained national fame was A&W, originally sold in Lodi, California one hot June night in 1919. Roy Allen, later to be joined by partner Frank Wright, was one of the few soft drink entrepreneurs who was not a pharmacist. His root beer formula was purchased from a pharmacist in Arizona for a measly fifty dollars.
To increase lagging sales in the 1930’s Hires advertised that their root beer was made with 16 roots, barks, herbs, and berries which were blended in a slow costly percolation process. Another promotional item actually revealed those ingredients. One herb is labeled only as, “Hires Own Plant”. It can safely be assumed to be sassafras, as every root beer recipe I have found lists it as an ingredient.
The oldest recipe on record for commercial root beer included sassafras, Jamaican molasses, sugar, birch bark, ginger, juniper berries, licorice, vanilla, sarsaparilla, wintergreen, and yerba mate. The “Yerba Mate” contains a sticky substance that helps root beer retain its head.
Today there are a growing number of root beer bottling companies, the Columbia Soda Works as documented by Michael and Cheryl Nelson, being just one. Most have strong regional followings, but some have gone national. Henry Weinhard’s beer and ale fame is now bottling a tasty root beer aimed at the non-alcohol drinking public. It is very tasty. Vernor’s, a popular ginger ale from the East coast, is now marketing root beer in cans. Here in California, several popular micro-breweries are adding root beer and sarsaparilla to their line of beverages. Sassafras is no longer used in root beers due to the belief that it may be a natural carcinogenic (if it was true more cowboys would have died of cancer than lead poisoning). A careful blend of sarsaparilla, wintergreen, and ginger is now used to imitate the old time flavor.
There is good reason to believe that without Mr. Charles Hires, root beer as we know it, would have faded from American History. A whole generation of roller skating waitresses with short dresses would never have existed.
Thanks Mr. Hires. I’m really fond of root beer these days. And I finally figured out what those short dresses were for.
As in all things, moderation and knowledge is suggested in the use of herbal remedies. Please contact an herbalist or knowledgeable physician concerning herbal treatments.
