Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Root Beer

Episode Date: August 25, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why root beer is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Root beer, known for being tasty, famous for being American, Canadian, maybe Mexican. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why root beer is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alec Schmidt and I'm not alone. I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden, Katie. Yes.

What is your relationship to or opinion of root beer? I like it, but I never see no roots in there. Yes, I like it. And I had never truly questioned the root name or anything or known what it's flavored after or anything. So it was exciting to find out. Yeah. It was good. I think I've become more of a root beer snob as an adult.

Like I don't go for the fountain, just sort of fountain mug root beer anymore. It's got to be more artisanal. Yeah. I'm also not a big root beer float person. So I actually don't have it a lot anymore. But as a kid, I had it more. No, same love ice cream, love root beer. Keep them separate.

And I also, like, in reading about this, as I understand it, root beer is considered gross by, like, most countries outside of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. So I'm really excited to tell folks outside of those three countries about this. What's going on? I've been through this with both cream soda and root beer with Italians. They don't understand it. I'm like, but you like Coke. And they're like, yeah, but that's Coke. It's like, but that's, why wouldn't you like root beer then?

Rupier and Coke are similar, but Coke is worse. Okay, I'm glad you have experience with this. And I also think cream soda is gross, but I think I'm weird. Yeah. Yeah. It's like too what it is. I understand. I like it, but I understand.

And yeah, and this is such a borderline universal soda in the U.S. Like when you mention the fountain, I feel like it's one of the four or five things every time. Yeah. Even though it's sort of a specific flavor. Yeah, it's interesting. Sprite and root beer and probably Sprite, yeah, yeah. Probably either Coke or Pepsi. And yeah, on most episodes, we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and stats.

As I researched this out, I decided that goes at the end. And we're starting with what the heck this is with takeaway number one. Root beer is a name for a colonial North American drink that imitated Native American teas made from the root bark of at least one of two plants. Oh, interesting. So another thing that white people stole. Native people across North America were making teas out of the root bark of either sassafras or sasparilla.

I always thought sassafras was just like a made-up word, and then I learned later that it was actually a thing. In my note stock, I have the line, both of those people. plant names feel like Looney Tunes dialogue to me, because also Yosemite Sam wanted Sasparilla. Yeah, Sasparilla, Saffir and Saffir and Sarkatash, apparently all these things are real. They are, yeah, and so many S's. And I also found varying pronunciation stuff with Sasparilla because it's spelled S-A-R-S-A-P-A-R-I-L-L-A. The name comes from the Spanish colonizers calling it Zarza-Paria.

Hmm. English speakers have anglicized and also sometimes shortened it. So some people say at Sarsaparilla, like that would be phonetically, but I mostly hear it Sassparilla and we'll just run with that. All right. Sounds good to me because I don't think I can pronounce it the other way anyways. And yeah, and then colonial people who came to North America made a few additions to it and also interacted with native people who are still here.

And so the upshot is root beer becoming. a drink made of the root bark of either the sassafras tree or the sasparilla vine. One's a tree and one's a vine. Hmm, okay. Do they ever like pair up? Because trees and vines sometimes, you know, they get together. Sassafras is mostly in especially the southeastern U.S. and then it grows smaller as you go north. It wants warmer weather. And then sasperilla vines want very warm weather. So it's almost more from Mexico and it partly got a Spanish name. because that's where the Spanish were colonizing. Right.

Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. Basically, the former Confederacy is the especially big range for sassafras trees. And they can become very large there, too. Is that why Yosemite Sam, like Sassfras and Sasparilla? Because I feel like, canonically, he's part of the Confederacy when there's, like, Bugs Bunny as part of the union. Also, they're associated with the Old West, especially.

Asperilla. So that's why Sam gets in there. But yeah, these were both plants turned into basically herbal teas. Sassafras trees, they were called various things by various native peoples. The names include Kaffee, Powame, and Winok were names for the tree. And the Cornell Botanic Garden is one source this week. They say that that English name Sassafras probably comes from 1500s Europeans and they like mispronounced what became a botanical family scientific name of saxifrage. Oh, okay. And then like worked it into sassafras. So it's been called all sorts of things. Sassafras is a bit better than saxifrage. It's friendlier. And the sassafras tree has been used for root bark and if you're in a pinch other bark to make teas for many centuries.

The Choctaw people who are especially in the Gulf Coast area now, they were known for grinding up the leaves also and cooking that as a flavorful thickener for like soups and stews. Oh, interesting. And that led to some creole gumbo recipes that do the same thing. Oh, that sounds good. But it was a bigger thing to turn the bark into a very tasty, almost medicinal kind of tea. Did it have like medicinal properties that were either docking?

documented by Choctaw people or by modern researchers? Yeah, it seems both groups think there's something minor. Like all sorts of native people basically drank sassafras tea as a digestive age, but not in the way where you expect some massive medicinal impact. Like it's kind of a cozy digestive. Yeah, there's a lot of things that I hear are good for your digestion, where I think that's a little bit of an excuse. Like, here in Italy, there's a lot of after-dinner drinks that are offered,

where it's like, it's good for your digestion. Like, right, sure. You just like, for net, man. I don't know. Yeah, exactly. I'm not saying it's not true. I'm not saying it's not true. But there is a human tendency to be like, ah, yes, this delicious drink.

It's good for my digestion. Yeah. And then there were other claims about it helping, like, cure colds and fevers and stuff. And it seems like it's sort of in the chicken soup zone where it's as helpful as it is. It's not some wonder drug or something. Right. Yeah. So it does potentially help.

But yeah, it's not a miracle cure. And so especially people in the southeast did that. And I'm also going to link a newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. They interview a Cherokee Nation citizen named Roberta Sapp, who says she makes a hot sassafras tea, every fall and winter, you just gather the root bark. And the recipes basically boil it, like most teas. Yeah, that's a pretty standard tea recipe. And she says she learned that recipe from her grandfather who learned it from generations before him. And then also some people would just let that tea chill and drink it cold. Refrigeration is pretty new in all of history, but this

tea's been drank at various temperatures too. Right, right. So like iced tea. Yeah, yeah. And then the sasperilla vine. It's any of a set of climbing vine plant species in the genus Smilax. And there are a few all over the tropical worlds. One called Smilax or Nata is from Central America and was kind of the leading one for being turned into sasperilatis. And again, you use the root bark. There's less bark like up the vine. Oddly a very similar process and relatively similar flavors, even though it's a tree and vine that are separate from each other. I mean, we've found that to be the case for, like, a lot of things, like cinnamon. They're different, completely different species of trees that produce cinnamon.

Yeah, this really reminded me of it. And also, like, in the doodles on, I don't know, bottles of barks or whatever, there'll be barrels. And I think I was confused about, like, okay, do they put, like, roots in a barrel or something? Like, there was, like, a wood vibe of some kind. But it's these two plants specifically are the leading ways to get the flavor we think of as root beer. Right. And the vine, like the bark is more towards the root, so I'm starting to see something there. Yeah, it's root bark, and that's why it's called root beer. Right. The beer part is still strange. And that's coming and separate weirdly, because I also found a general consensus that

sasperilla roots are a little more bitter, but otherwise they're pretty similar. And also, some native people would add lots of other flavors to this if they wanted to. Combine it with winter green, vanilla, molasses, other spice-type flavors, especially after the Colombian exchange as more stuff came. Some of those are from the exchange. And then white colonizers just learned this recipe and did it too. So like we just did the same exact tea at first? Yeah. And then the main thing that white people added that wasn't really going on was fermentation. Okay. Oh, so now we're getting to the weird beer part. Yeah, that's basically the entire reason the word beer is in the name of this, because they would use fermentation principles to make it maybe a little bit carbonated

or a little bit fizzy and also to kind of bring all the flavors together of their mix. Did it actually create an alcoholic drink? I found so many different claims about it from blogs and stuff. The actual consensus from relatively well-sourced stuff seems to, to be that it was maybe a little bit more alcoholic than kombucha. I see, okay. But probably not even approaching the, like, lowest alcohol beer level. All right. Okay.

So, yeah, because kombucha is fermented and it is very, very slightly alcoholic, but really not enough to, you'd have to drink an incredible amount within a very short period of time where I feel like getting tipsy is the least of your concerns at that point. Right, right. You'd be on the toilet just so much liquid, you know? Like, I don't know. Yeah, you would explode.

You wouldn't have a good time. No. And then also these colonizers from Europe were not thinking about kombucha. That name is Japanese. It had not quite spread to them yet. And so when they fermented roots plus other flavors and were looking for a word, they kind of reached for beer, even though, especially in the drinking culture of colonial North America, this was. borderline no alcohol. It was probably approaching 1% ABV in most cases. Right. Yeah, but it's got more of a connection to beer than I thought it. I thought it did. Me too. Yeah, because folks,

if you buy a plastic bottle of root beer or an aluminum can of root beer, it should be actually zero alcohol these days. You'd have to really seek out a version that is alcoholic. And we'll talk about types of that later actually but well i assume we figured out how to carbonate it without fermenting it necessarily exactly yeah that's one of the reasons it's not fermented anymore and and like colonial north america they were extreme boozehounds especially in that first century of the united states existing like on on the passive about apples we talked about most apple growth here being to make extremely hard apple cider and not to eat the apples so right right and so we had like not super tasty apples. They were apples for making cider.

Yeah. So if you gave someone a root drink that was 0.5% ABV, like they wouldn't know that number, but they would drink it and not think, I'm boozing, because they're used to like constant drunkenness, basically. Right. And so they also don't blink about something being called beer. They're like, I don't know, whatever. Sure. Yeah. A healthy foundation for our country. the temperance movement was getting at something like we kind of yuck it up a bit about prohibition now but yeah there were some fixings that needed to happen to balance things out a bit it was maybe the wrong solution to an actual problem yeah yeah the other changes that especially white colonizers made were to take sassafras and sasparilla and merge them all into a concept of root beer as

time went on, people would use one or both to make the drink and never really categorize it properly. And by the mid-1800s, if you were in the U.S. West and you ordered sasparilla, the drink was usually made of sassafras and birch oil with no sasparilla plants. Birch oil. That doesn't sound particularly appealing birch oil. The other weird thing is people, and native people did this too, they would make all sorts of drinks out of the tree bark and root bark of birch trees. Like, you can make a different drink out of that. And we just tended to call that birch tea or birch beer.

It didn't get lumped in with the sasparilla and the sassifress. Hmm. Tree tastes usually don't super appeal to me unless it's, say, a cinnamon or root beer. But, yeah, I've had, like, certain, like, people say, like, oh, this has, like, a very, like, woody flavor. It's usually not something I like. Yeah, and all these drinks are less sweet than root beer today. Right.

Like you might sweeten it with molasses or honey or just straight up cane sugar if you feel like it, I guess, if you're rich. But this was more of a medicinal and herbal kind of flavor still. Yeah. Sounds like it's sacked is what you're saying. It sounds like it just suss. Don't drink it. I'm joking. And my last favorite story with naming this and promoting it is a very weird brand of early root tea and root beer that went viral on the internet in 2020.

It's from the 1880s and from Calgary. There was a city newspaper that ran a series of cryptic ads for this beverage, and the beverage's entire name was Krunk. I mean, C-R-O-N-K, Kronk, like a caveman name. I mean, that's a name. That really does sound modern, though, like some, I mean, obviously there's Kronk from Emperor's New Groove, but beyond that, it sounds like surge or some kind of like energy drink marketed towards gamers. It really does, yeah, like Kronk would have Master Chief on it because they're doing a

promotion right now for Halo. Yeah, sure. Right. Yeah. Their mascot is like a cyborg caveman. And then like a different meaning of pull the lever, you know? Like, it's not like Emperor's New Groove. Yeah.

It's like, pull the lever on some cronk. Yeah. Yeah. Cronk. And yeah, and the ad will link a picture of it. It is weirdly modern style. Basically, this Calgary. newspaper had a lot of little classified ads where it's just a sentence about something people

want and the makers of cronk seem to have bought every other ad so in between regular classified ads there's just extremely simple statements of drink cronk and get cronk it's really weird and funny the one i don't quite get is dr cronk yeah i sent this to katie too and we're about to get and to basically all sodas originating from some medical claims. Right. And so in root beer's case, it intertwines with the native beliefs and vibes about root teas. Like, there was some belief that something positive would happen to you. It's not just tasty.

We were definitely willing to use that for advertising products. Listen to Native Americans in that sense. But when they're like, we would like some sovereignty over our own land. It's like, they're like, no, we're going to build Calgary. But you guys have fun, First Nations folks. Right. But like a drink being good for your digestion, that is something we can get groove with. So cronk is the drink is one of the adverts.

Yeah, cronk is the drink. I really have to emphasize there's no images. It's just like you have between each classified a single thing. sentence separated by, you know, like lines that separate each, each ad. It's just drink cronk. Cronk is good. Buy Cronk. Cronk is the drink. Yeah. It's, uh, it's awesome. I really love it. It's so ahead of its time, 1883. Yeah. Like one of them is just cronk is good. No further explanation of why or what it is or anything. I respect it. I honestly do. Yeah. And, and, Someone, like, took a scan of this and tweeted it in 2020, and that blew up and went viral and led a community of internet users to dig up the recipe of Kronk, which was made in the 1840s.

So they went back 180 years and discovered that it's one of many standard root beer recipes of colonial America and Canada. Kronk was a mixture of sassifras and sasparilla as well as high. hops, camamil, flowers, cinnamon, and ginger. And then you boil and ferment that, then add molasses. I might mess with that. I'm a sucker for anything with ginger in it. I was hoping that there was still a cronk factory somewhere, and then this new interest in it brought cronk back.

Great news. So nobody had been making it, but it went viral, and then people found the recipe. and then Cold Garden Brewery, a modern company in Calgary, proceeded to make new batches of Crunk. Incredible. I don't know if they're still doing it in 2025, but in 2020 they made a limited run of Crunk.

Were they able to call it Crunk? Like, was anyone sitting on that trademark? Like a very litigious skeleton. Like, hey, hey. I don't find you stealing my IP humorous at all. I got a lawyer to work for me, pro bono. Nah. Right, he's a cryptkeeper skeleton, yeah.

And yeah, and so that's how a thing called root beer began to originate. And it also predates most of the commercial brands that are still with us. That gets us into takeaway number two. The first. The first major commercial root beer was the first major soda pop in America and caused a public conflict between two forces on the side of alcohol prohibition. Hmm. Were they, okay. Now, I'm not going to guess.

I want to go into this blind. And it's a brand I hadn't heard of. I'm always blaming Mormons for things, and I need to stop. I really need to stop doing that. Yeah, Mormon's not involved. And I saw, I saw like some loose claims that root beer is extra popular in Mormon communities because it's not caffeinated usually, which is, you know, makes sense. Just, yeah. Oh, that's a good point.

The first commercially popular brand of root beer, apparently it only went out of production in 2023 and might come back. It's a brand called HIRES, H-I-R-E-S, and it was a guy's last name, Hires root beer. Yeah, I'm looking at an advert for H-E-R-R-Bier. They say there's a lot of snap and vim in it. This topic is also so pleasantly old-timey. It's great. Alex, did you know there's lots of pleasure and good health in it, too? Yeah.

It turns out basically every American soda pop. And I called it pop growing up. Most people called it soda. Let's not worry about it. But I thought that was like an east-west divide. Yeah, Midwest, it was a lot of pop. and then I think both coasts it's soda. I see, okay.

When I've lived on both coasts, people did little jabs at me for calling it pop. Well. And then the southeast, some people call all of it coke, which is confusing. That's, okay, I'm fine with people calling it pop. I'm not fine with people calling everything Coke. That's like calling all meat chicken. You can't. It's just not true.

Exactly. It's simply inaccurate. But yeah, a guy named Charles Elmer Hires was one of many pharmacists and druggists who were partly trying to make soda pop for health reasons. Hmm. And so he made, like, like the name root beer and the concept of root beer already existed. And he tried to build that into a big commercial brand with more success than anybody in the history of soda pop to that point. I mean, was this soda pop sort of different? from today's soda because soda's in no way healthy goes quite far in the other direction.

Yeah. And also basically all of the druggists doing this, they at best were in the chicken soup zone that I described earlier. And Hires was broadly in the chicken soup zone. And then our bonus show in particular will talk about what a lot of folks kind of assume, is the first soda pop, Coca-Cola. It also kind of famously had coca leaves in it. I didn't assume that at all, Alex.

How dare you? Because, of course, the first soda is cronk. So, you know, there you go. Cronk! That's what I, I knew it in my heart before I actually knew it in my brain. So, yeah, Charles Elmer-Hires basically finds out that root beer

exists on his honeymoon and then commercializes it. Oh, okay. Key sources for this takeaway are an amazing piece for serious eats.com by writer Robert Moss, a piece for eater.com by Megan Wenzel, and a piece for Philadelphia magazine by writer Sandy Hingston, who cites food writer Bill Double for his expertise. Philadelphia magazine is a source partly because Charles Elmer Hires was a Philadelphia pharmacist. And he was also a Quaker. And Quakers vary on whether they drink alcohol. Hires did not. He was a teetotaler. Yeah, I didn't think, I thought for Quakers it was not doctrine that you couldn't do it. It's just a lot of them happened to be super into temperance.

Exactly. And so Hires, his dream from surprisingly early in life was to be a pharmacist who makes healthful tonics for everyday people, like healthful liquids. I like the name tonics. It's like, I don't necessarily believe in them, but if someone's like, would you like a tonic? Like, that does sound pretty good, a healthful tonic. That was the branding of almost every soda we have today when it started out. That's why Dr. Pepper has doctor in it, like, everything. Because we used to do that with smoking as well, like cigarettes are actually good for you, somehow.

Yeah. Soda is somehow good for you. Now it's just marketing for stuff is just like, hell yeah, dude, this will be fun and taste good. Yeah, I guess they lost enough of the battle to science that food producers then said. Let's just say it tastes awesome because that can be true. Like, sure. Sugar crack puffs. They taste really good.

And yeah, and Charles Elmer hires, he so wanted to be a pharmacist. Here's his childhood. He was born in 1851. And then when he was seven years old in the 1850s, this is how he like played when he went to play. He would collect old bottles. He would clean the bottles. Normal. He would fill them with colored liquids that he made from various plants. Super normal. And then he would set up like a pretend front of a drugstore to pretend to vend tonics. That's so freaking cute. Seven years old. It's the cutest thing. I really relate to that. When I was little, I used to like boil random leaves and be like,

you know, I have made nature tea. And I would try to get my family to drink it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It is a kid thing to be like, I brought you the stick or leaf or whatever. Sure. Right. Yeah.

I mean, it's a little, okay, so it's a little more complicated than just bringing someone a stick or a leaf, Alex. It's boiling the stick or the leaf and presenting it as, you know, nature tea. Crunk, the nature tea. Yeah. That's basically how he played as a child. That's so cute. And the other kind of lucky thing is he had two older sisters, and both of them married actual pharmacists. Oh, okay.

So then starting at age 12, he got to Apprentice with both of them. Oh. Charles worked his way up to being the third owner of the pharmacy in Philadelphia. I mean, this is a very pharmacological family. It all dovetails. Like, he was surrounded by people who were also into this. And as soon as his early 20s, Charles Elmer hires created his first. first ever tonic and basically completed his dream.

Yeah. It was not root beer. It was called Hires' dyspepsia mixture. Ooh, dyspepsia. I know what dyspepsia is. It's tummy aches. Yeah. That's kind of been the whole origin of this drink is it'll probably help with a tummy

ache, we think. Right. Is one of the claims. Like there could be other cultural or even spiritual beliefs about it. But mainly it was like, this is kind of a break. racing roots drink and your stomach will either feel better or you'll be distracted. It's cool, you know. Right. It's hard to know, like, whether that actually would have an effect or it's just like, well, something's happening in my mouth and my stomach now and it's not just a tummy ache.

And Hires' main goal with his dyspepsia mixture was health. He said that it would also cure constipation, lack of appetite, depression, dizziness, heart palpitations, vomiting, headaches, and also improve your vision if your vision was out of whack. Probably none of that was true, but it was his hope. You could, I mean, I think it's really important to remember. You could just say things back in these times and no one would question you. There was no, I don't even think there was like an FDA at this point, was there? There was not. Yeah, there's a pure food and drug act in the United States from 1906. So about 50 years later, that that really starts getting a lot of like positive practices going.

And before that, it was literally the Wild West and also you could just say whatever. You could just say anything. Yeah. When Charles makes his actual dyspepsia mixture at a pharmacy, he is almost still doing what he did as a kid, just playing with liquids and bottles. Like, it's not a whole lot different. Doesn't seem like there was a lot of R&D happening. I also, just for like his sake, I love that he pretty much achieved his dream in his early 20s. So then he could say, what else do I do?

which was just more tonics. And then at age 24, he gets married, and Charles and his wife, Clara, go on a honeymoon to northern New Jersey. They stop at a farm near Morristown, New Jersey, and quoting Sandy Hingston here, the pair were served a cool, sparkling concoction, brewed from native roots, herbs, barks, and berries that the farmwife called homemade root beer.

Hires cajoled the woman into sharing her recipe with him, then spent a year experimenting with it before settling on a product he claimed contains 16 different roots, barks, herbs, and berries. I love the idea that like during their honeymoon, he becomes obsessed with this root beer drink. And his new wife, Claire, is like, please come to bed, make love to me. He's like, not now, woman, I'm working on this root beer drink. Right, he's just in the woods. She turns around and he's in the woods sticking up another plant root.

Yeah. Chewing on more sticks. And so Hires becomes obsessed. He says, like, this is delicious and I can presume it probably has health benefits. You can always presume that. Why not? And also his timing was extremely lucky because this marriage and honeymoon was 1875. He finished the project in like early 1876.

And really a few weeks later, maybe a few months, the city of Philadelphia, his home city, hosts an 1876 centennial exposition, drawing nine million visitors from all over the United States. We did so many things like that back then. And it was where you would go to see what's new in the world. Yeah, we didn't have internet back then. Exactly. It basically was the internet before that. And hires handed out glasses of his drink. and also the way his drink was made was that he would sell people's small packets of a powdered base

and then you can mix that with soda water or still water. This is, I hate bringing up ranch, but this is remarkably like Hidden Valley Ranch where it's like, yeah, okay, we don't know how to preserve all the disgusting wet ingredients in ranch. So here's a packet of spices to add to your disgusting wet ingredients. That's also how soda fountains have always worked. It's just that the first old-timey ones were an employee mixing the ingredients with fizzy water. And today it's an employee of a restaurant behind that fountain machine mixing it. But we just never think about it as consumers.

And hires did this early enough that he encouraged people to do it at home. And we called them soda jerks because they'd mix up your soda and they'd hand it to you and be like, Here's your root beer, idiot. Pool the lever, jerk. You know? And then Hires' product, he promised that one small box made five gallons. So that sold very well. And from that 1876 launch, Hires rapidly becomes the first millionaire in the history of Soda Pop as a business.

And Hires' branding was excellent because he had three different features he could. could push. He could push delicious flavor. And the second feature was health. His ads claimed it was, quote, the greatest health-giving beverage in the whole world. Right? Right. Like, go for it. Yeah, why not? Like, if you're going to make a claim, just freaking go for it, man. Just literally the most healthy liquid on earth. Like, great, sure, yeah. Root beer will make you immortal. You will never die. You will plead for death. You will become bored of the universe as it grows cold around you, but you will not die. You cannot die because root beer has made you immortal.

And then the third feature is where a conflict happens, because Hires promoted it as, quote, a temperance drink of the highest medicinal value. He promoted it as, this is non-alcoholic, it fits the temperance movement. And he wasn't lying. He had an earnest interest in that because he didn't happen to drink. But is it? fun, Alex? Did he consider it might be a little too fun? So the problem is the name because Hires almost called his drink a root tea. I see. And also the production process did involve a fermentation step, but to probably not even the

kombucha level. We don't have exact ABV for his recipe, but it seems it was borderline not alcoholic, even though there was a fermentation. Yeah, I mean, there's like alcohol in a lot of things. Like there's borderline fermentation in a lot of stuff. Yeah. Like a ripe fruit has some slight fermentation in it. It's basically nothing. So you're not going to get drunk off of it.

That's a great comparison. And we don't have a numerical ABV, but eventually Hires had an independent chemist test it for him. apparently the chemist said it had the same trace alcohol level as half a loaf of bread. Yeah. Like a large bottle of his drink. So that's, for practical purposes, non-alcoholic. Yeah.

But unfortunately, a friend convinced him to brand it as root beer rather than root tea. Hmm. And that's probably why we call the drink root beer today. Like, if he'd called it root tea, it probably would have been influential enough to stick. But he was friends with a guy who ended up being famous. His name is Russell Conwell. He's not famous, famous, but he was a major Philadelphian and founded Temple University. His name is Conwell, and he's like helping to sell tonics and stuff.

Yeah. And Conwell said, you'll never do major sales if he call it a root tea, because, quote, our hard drinking minors in central Pennsylvania will never touch a drink labeled tea. That might be true. I feel this Rupert Gryftwell might have a point. And yeah, like, whether it's because of the name or not, it's sold really well. Like, he wasn't wrong. Right.

Like, as a kid, you can, like, put your thumb over the root part, and then you feel like you're drinking beer. Yeah, I also, I have specific memories of a brand called IBC, root beer in brown bottles. And I didn't want to drink alcoholic beer. I just felt more adult drinking that. at, you know? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Like, as a kid, my parents very shrewdly allowed me to try beer and wine, so there was no, like, mystique about it. And it's like, it's disgusting. I don't want this, you know, very smart parents. But you do like to feel like an adult. So when you're given a root beer that has similar branding to, like, adult beverage, you're like, ah, yes, here I am.

And then you can, like, you know, sort of have like one of those roll up wafers. in your mouth like you're smoking a cigar. And so I'm not, I'm, I'm, uh, of course these miners wanted to feel like adults, Alex, and Jacob's grown-up beer drink. Yeah, so the coal mining adults, uh, they drank this up. And some children probably, in all historic honesty, there were children in the, in the mines. Yeah, 1800s. Uh, yeah.

Uh, they yearn for the mines. Yeah, along with the FDA, like basic labor protections were still coming along. So that branding hires as root beer. It becomes a massive national brand. And then once it's just so national, in the mid-1890s, a freelance chemist causes a health scare. I couldn't even find their name. Like, it seems like this was just fly-by-night stuff. The chemists said they analyzed hires his root beer and found a high percentage of alcohol.

hall. Mm-hmm. And I guess the rumor stuck because beer is in the name. Right, right. And also by the 1890s, the temperance movement is really rolling. Probably the leading group in the U.S. and maybe the world is called the Women's Christian Temperance Union. So they launch a national boycott.

And there was, like, if people are like, well, did women just like fun less than men? No, the reason that women were at the forefront of this is that there was. household issues that would often drive this, right? So women being pretty marginalized and sidelined by society where they're stuck at home with kids and housework. And of course, there were very little protections against, like, say, abusive husbands. And so the temperance movement really latched on to these very real issues of both, like, say, domestic violence, but also women being socially isolated stuck at home while their husbands would go out and socialize and drink. And suffrage as well.

There were like legitimate social issues that women were noticing and temperance seemed like a possible solution to this problem. It was not just because they're a bunch of killjoys. And it's a weird conflict that happens because hires agrees with them. Like, he's into temperance. He's not just exploiting it to sell the root beer. But for three entire years, the women's Christian temperance union boycotts his drink based on this freelance chemist's report and some facts. Like, there is a fermentation step and so on. That chemist's name was William Lysbig.

Nominative determinism strikes Philadelphia once again. Charles hires keeps hiring people. He can't stop. He's stuck. Right. Yeah. So then, like, national media runs with this health scare about all root beers. Apparently in 1896, the New York Times ran an editorial headline, is root beer insidious?

Which, if you run a root beer company, you should make fun with that, you know, like run with it. Yeah. I mean, this is so human beings are so much the same as we are different, right? because like we have this happen all the time with our modern media landscape where there's like some food and it's like butter in your coffee is we'll make you immortal a year later butter and your coffee will kill you you will die yeah eggs red wine all of it it's always either the worst are the best at all times and yeah yeah like this is a miracle this is a miracle food and then like this miracle food will make your arms fall off and your head explodes yeah and so they're There's like about a three-year panic where people say root beer is tricking America. Yeah. It takes until 1898 for hires to get the women's Christian Temperance Union to drop the boycott, partly with his independent lab tests, that it seems like it took him too long to think of.

But they finally reached the point that, yes, the product is essentially non-alcoholic. There's trace alcohol. And then apparently that caused a new peak of hires as root beer sales. And nobody truly ate into his market share Until partway through the 1900s All right, well I guess that's a happy ending for him If not his wife, his poor neglected wife

I think this also came up with road alices One of the creators of like turn by turn pictorial directions Spent his honeymoon Doing that with cameras on the car Yeah, he used his honeymoon This was a thing guys did at the turn of the century Like, my honeymoon is a perfect opportunity for business. I don't know.

I think if Brett had tried to turn our honeymoon into an economics research expedition, it would not have gone down very well. Yeah, I'm glad I didn't try to turn mine into a sift topic or something. That would have been tough. Right. Like, I suppose I could have just as easily turned our honeymoon into a podcast. There's like a microphone in my sleeve. And Brenda's like, come on.

Hey. And that's two giant takeaways about this drink. We're going to take a quick break then do one more takeaway and tons of amazing stats and numbers about especially the modern status of root beer. I'm excited. And we're back, and we have one more takeaway before numbers. It's takeaway number three. Almost every modern root beer is an artificial imitation of the former root drink, partly due to a 1960s cancer concern.

Yeah, I feel like I was vaguely aware of this. Okay, yeah, I'd never heard of it. Unless you're finding some amazingly specific. craft beverage, and I'm sure they exist. Basically, every root beer is an imitation of what it used to be, and no plants are involved. If I'm remembering correctly, like, this may have been one of those things where actually the cancer threat was a little overblown, but by the time we caught up with that,

it's too late. Everyone liked the other root beer, and it was cheaper to make. Yep, that's what happened. And yeah, because the other reason is it's just cheaper to never involve plants in your soda supply chain. It's already unhealthy. It can just be completely artificial. Like, why not? Yeah. So they ran with it. A lot of key sources here, including digital resources from the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and the Cornell Botanic Gardens. Also a piece for the Seattle Times by writer Tantry Ouija. And then digital resources from the McGill University Office for Science and Society.

As root beer becomes a common soda pop, more and more of it is made from sassifras roots. And then there's a study in the 1960s leading to a U.S. ban on sassafras roots as a carcinogen because they said it has high amounts of a natural compound called saffrol. But according to McGill University, that was a probably flawed study, especially because it only studied rats. Oh, yeah, that's going to, whenever you read sort of a headline about this thing found to be dangerous or cancer causing, I would always encourage. you to look at the study. Yeah. I'm not saying that, like, reporting or studies on this are always wrong or disingenuous.

It's just, it's always worthwhile to, like, before you panic, to see, like, all right, is this in mice, though? And also, how much did they get? Yeah, exactly. And so it has both the flaws. The finding of these 60s studies was that sephrol in high doses causes liver cancer in rats. But apparently they gave massive doses of it to the rats. If you tried to get a similar amount into a human through root beer, it would be a lot of root beer. Right.

The other issue is that rodent studies are exciting because it can lead to valuable human studies. We then did human studies and have not quite found consistent similar results. Yeah. With a saffrol effect on humans, which is the whole point. Like, it doesn't matter if only rodents get this. We're not feeding them root beer. This is why you might get the impression that science, Scientists think we've cured cancer like 5,000 times before.

It's usually just the reporting on it. The researchers themselves are not delusional. They found some breakthrough in mice or rats. And that's important. That's important research. It's not, it's not useless. It's, that's how we get to eventually having better treatments. Like sometimes a headline will just be like, cure for cancer found.

And it's like, in mice. And it's, you know, never been tested in humans. And a lot of times you don't even have to read the study if you just get to, like, paragraph five or six of the news article. They'll quote the scientists saying, like, I mean, this is very preliminary on that one mouse might be weird. I don't know, man. Yeah. But then, like, the headline and the picture are of an immortal mouse who's, like, lifting a car. Yeah.

A god mouse. Yeah. So, yeah. So then this study, it led to a U.S. FDA ban on the use of basically both plant roots, because apparently Sasparilla also has some cipherol. I couldn't find super specific information on it. And then also, because of the origins of this drink being so specific to the U.S. and its next-door countries, not a lot of other countries were bothering to make the drink.

And the upshot is that U.S. ban on those ingredients meant that 1916. 60s and onward soda companies just pivoted to artificial root beer because it's illegal to make it with the roots and also cheaper to make it without the roots. I mean, it'd be really interesting to see that same study with the same methodology repeated with the artificial ingredients put in root beer because I wonder if it's like any different. Once in a while I see a headline about the artificial stuff in the zero sugar soda I drink. Can I just try now to think about it basically? Yep.

Exactly, exactly. So again, there are these studies, and of course, if there's a new good human study, that's new and let's use it. But for now, we don't think we have great information about those roots being trouble, especially because saffrol does not just occur naturally and sassafras and sasparilla. Apparently, there's trace amounts of it in many herbs like basil and many of the like winter treats. spices like nutmeg and cinnamon. It all occurs naturally. It's no grower or producer's fault. But it's a low enough amount in those that, between the low amount and a lack of concerning scary studies, the FDA has not banned those. So there's probably sephral in your diet, but it won't be from root beer. Root beer is like our attempt to capture what it was a century

ago. There's got to be though like an sort of artisanal hipster root beer that would totally make it out of the root, though. Yeah, apparently there are, and also either through cultivation or filtration, they can get the saffrol out. So that's the way you can get it made from the roots, but they're taking the saffrol out because this is, at least in the U.S., still on the books. I see, interesting. So that's the other approach, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's funny because I'm sure just the sugar part of the soda is way worse.

It's another news story. I'm glazing over. Thank you very much. but it's true. Not saying we should ban it. I'm not saying we should ban it, but I think a little perspective is important here. Exactly.

And so if you can find it with roots, that's fun and probably safe. And if you can't, that's also the standard situation. And that's where we're at. Yeah. And folks, that leads us to the last thing

of the main show, which is our stats and numbers. That ends the show this week. And this week that's in a segment called, dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called stats. electric words stats they go on forever and that's a mighty long time and i hear him to tell you

there's something else numbers that that is nothing like how prince talks i'm so sorry it's supposed to be the beginning of let's go crazy but thank you to serial thron on the discord uh we have a new name for this segment every week please make them a silly and wacky as possible submit yours through discord or to sift pot at gmail dot com i mean the visual element is missing which is that you are dressed like prince um right Right, right. So that would have helped. Yeah, when I logged on, you were like, hi, Purple Alex.

I assume that's your new name now from how you act and dress. Nice, nice pumps, Alex. Thank you. Yeah, you can't see my head in the Zoom frame. I'm a lot taller. But yeah, first number this week is 1893. That is an estimate for the invention of root beer floats the year 1893. did I like I imagine it was some laboratory accident like one lab technician carrying a glass of root beer another lab technician carefully carrying a sample of ice cream they both trip at the same time the ice cream flies through the air and lands in the root beer the food laboratory technicians are like my god they have like an openheimer moment openheimer I mean I know his name's Oppenheimer

or that was obviously a joke that I made on purpose. Open the lever, Oppenheimer. It's basically just that root beer and ice cream both became more and more commercialized around the same time, and somebody put them together. And there's lore about that being a gold mine owner in Colorado in 1893. But none of that's solid. There's very little chance that there's like one key inventor of root. beer floats. It seems like people put it together a few places. Well, like, because I thought at a lot of soda, like these soda jerks and these, what even were these establishments called?

Because sometimes they'd be like combined with pharmacies as well. But you'd go, you'd basically go to like a bar and you could get ice creams and you could get soda. And they would like mix it up and make it for you there and hand it to you. And then you'd, you know, share it with your boyfriend or girlfriend, and then hijinks would ensue. Either like a soda fountain or the business was just called a drugstore, and then you knew it had that counter. And yeah, it was basically a counter where they had the machines to carbonate water and to make ice cream stay cold.

And then they would serve one or both to you. So that's another reason root beer floats happens pretty naturally. Like, they were just doing both things. So it really makes sense probably a lot of people were like, oh, like putting the ice cream in the soda, like, you know, just playing around with stuff. Exactly. And so apologies to this Colorado gold mine owner, but he's not an Oppenheimer figure. Like, everybody kind of figured this out in parallel.

I don't feel particularly like apologizing to a gold mine owner personally. That's true. He has gold and probably people got crushed. Yeah. He's good. He's got gold. I'm not sorry. He's just a golden skeleton now.

Entirely solid gold boats. Yeah. I don't even need a lawyer who works pro bono. I have gold. The next number is 2016. 2016 is the year when a server at an Applebee's restaurant in Tennessee accidentally served three kids, bottles of alcoholic root beer. In the alco pop sector, there's been a big trend starting in the mid-2010. to make root beer that's actually alcoholic. You know, you could just mix this like vodka and soda or something, but it's an alcoholic version of soda in one container and made that way.

One of the leading versions is root beer with booze in it, partly because beer is already in the name of the regular non-alcoholic soda. And popular brands include Best Damn Root Beer, Coney Island Hard Root Beer, and one called Not Your Father's Root Beer. I've had a Not Your Fathers, and I respect to people who like it, but I really didn't like it. Yeah, and somebody accidentally gave it to these kids. So Applebee's in Johnson City, Tennessee, and I truly don't blame anybody involved,

because also root beer, unlike most other sodas, will often be in a brown bottle and stuff. And so this server just brought Not Your Father's Root Beer to three kids. And then, according to the kids' first. father, two of the kids, ages 9 and 11, drank some. The father flagged the server and said, hey, this booze. And the server was just confident that, no, it's fruit beer. And then they called the police. They called Applebee's corporate office. And also eater.com points out that this is a common chain restaurant error. It'll happen with like virgin strawberry dapperies and stuff. But alcoholic root beers are unique opportunity for this error because more than any other soda

looks and is named like alcohol. Yeah. There's also a famous regular root beer called Dad's Old Fashioned Root Beer. That's almost the name of Not Your Father's Root Beer, that this mistake is very prone with root beer. Yeah, it kind of seems inevitable. I mean, like, I feel like if this was happening a lot and a ton of kids were being sent to the hospital with alcohol poisoning because this was just happening in great numbers,

then I would be more concerned. but that does not sound like that's the case. This just sounds like, you know. Yeah, yeah. Po-Buddy's Nerfict. Yeah, and everybody was okay. It's okay. That's good, yeah.

Next number here is 1890, the year 1890. That is when two brothers named Edward Bark and Gaston Bark created a bottling business in New Orleans. Hmm. And B-A-R-Q, that's their last name. that's what became Barks Root Beer, their company. Would have assumed it's a modern name? The slogan is Barks Has Bite, it used to be. So it feels a little 1990s.

Yeah, I definitely know of this root beer, but I also, because of the stupid font that they use, I, for the longest time, thought it was Bangs Root Beer. Equally normal name ends. Yeah. The Barks Brothers, it's a real Franco-American last name. The source here is an independent New Orleans media site called 64 parishes. The Bark Brothers started out making a prize-winning orange soda.

It won a medal at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. But then one of the brothers passed away. Gaston passed away in 1892. Edward wants to expand the business and also just kind of start over. So he moves to Biloxi, Mississippi, makes a much bigger operation and says, what else do I diversify into? And they've made Barks root beer since 1898. It's very old.

That's pretty respectable. Do they still make orange soda? No, it's been like folded into other companies too. And so it's just a root beer brand now. Somewhere in the distance, Kel is crying. Kel doesn't love the demise of orange sodas. Tell you what. He's heartbroken.

And a next root beer brand here, the year is 1907. That is when Francisco Hill Ramirez founded a root beer brand called Root Beer Heel. That's spelled GIL. It's a Hispanic name. And apparently that's the brand that has made root beer relatively popular in Mexico, especially northern Mexico. Hmm. Then made Mexico one of the only three countries that seems to like this drink. Right.

Yeah. Yeah, because, I mean, but also Mexico has some pretty, pretty great sodas, so there's some competition there. Yeah, that too. They're a big soda country with lots of strong brands, and source here is an excellent magazine called Texas Monthly journalist Jose R. Valat covered the city of Hermosio and the state of Sonora in northern Mexico is the home base of what's now four generations of the Heal family making root beer. Their founder, Francisco Hill Ramirez, worked for soda companies in Los Angeles and then moved to Hermosio and went into business for himself. And they not only make root beer, they make a chocolate soda and they make something called Ferrisodata, which is a flavor combo of vanilla and orange and coffee.

I'm like really intrigued by all of this. Like chocolate soda, my immediate reaction is like, no, I would not like that. But now I'm wondering if it doesn't just taste a little bit like. like an interesting Coca-Cola or something. Right. Like I've had American chocolate sodas and I wonder if it's different because the American ones I'm not into. But there's like especially northeast people who love it.

Are they just like really, really sweet? Yeah. It's really sweet and not very like, yeah, there's not much like body to it to me. Yeah. Because like if there's a less sweet version of it, right? Because I mean, like again, because like chocolate in a savory capacity, there's like chocolate mole, right? chocolate molay sauce, which is really good, because it's not sweet. It's like a very bitter version.

Yeah. Yeah, it could be a lot of great things. And so, as a neat company. And also, of course, this story combines Hermosillo and Los Angeles. Those used to both be in Mexico. So that's the other reason root beer's popular in Mexico is that the U.S. put a lot of people on both sides of the border with connections to each other. So, yeah. Yeah. Like, it's very darkly, grimly funny when people act like Mexican culture does not belong in California because it's like, guys. Yeah, think about it for a second or stop being weird. It's called Los Angeles, eh?

That's interesting. And the next number here is 1919. And it's another California story. This is when a hotel operator named Roy Allen purchased somebody else's route. beer recipe 1919. He was in Lodi, California. Alan partnered with one of his hotel business employees to get a few root beer stands going. And so Roy Allen and Frank Wright turned their last initials into A&W. Allen and Wright. So that's the famous A&W root beer. Yeah, and they're part of why root beer's huge in Canada, but also, of course, in the U.S. Their popularity is different from the other

root beers where they just kind of sold themselves in the beverage business. Alan pretty quickly buys out Wright's shares, Wright wants to do other stuff, and then expands their root beer stands into a franchising model for root beer and a fast food restaurant. Hmm, that was smart. Yeah, and like it used to be a massive chain in the U.S. and has sort of declined, and apparently it remains a massive chain in Canada. It's second to McDonald's as a fast food business. Wow, I was not even aware. Yeah, me neither. There's an ANW fast food in my mom's town in Iowa, but otherwise I don't see it a lot here. Yeah, no, I've never, I've never seen one.

They were sort of like a Sonic or like another pretty early fast food, and so many fast food brands come from California, so it makes sense it was Lodi. Yeah, in the U.S., the root beer is big on its own as a drink, and then in Canada, the root beer and the restaurant are spreading it. Oh, but I mean, I guess anything to take McDonald's down a notch. Yeah, really, it's big competition. And the other wild number with them is $15 million U.S. Big money, $15 million. That is the legal settlement won by U.S. plaintiffs against the ANW root beer brand due to claims about the vanilla.

For some reason, USA and W, which is kind of a separate company from the Canadian restaurants at this point. Whoa, really? Yeah, it's weird. It was hard to parse, but they were separate. USA and W claimed to be made with aged vanilla. Like, I don't know why they did that. It's, like, obviously not true. They use an artificial vanilla and no plants are really involved in the beverage.

Also, does anyone, like, are there a bunch of vanilla heads who are, like, super into aged vanilla? I just, like, I'm actually kind of a vanilla stop. Like, I like getting the pods and then scraping out the little goopy beans. But, like, I don't think it, like, oh, I hope this is old. Yeah, especially if I'm buying a plastic bottle of root beer, I'm not. Right. I don't care. You don't need to make that claim on your bottle.

Right. And then a group of soda drinkers got around to noticing that they could probably win a class action lawsuit against brand owners, Kierig, Dr. Pepper, who do not own the Canadian restaurants. It's separate. The sort of the crossover between people who are soda enthusiasts and people who would be interested in being in a class action lawsuit is like just a circle. Yeah. So they, they started the suit in 2020. And then in 2023, a New York judge awarded a $15 million dollar fund to anyone who can either bring a receipt or just say they have drank A&W. Apparently, you can get up to $25 if you have receipts in the time period for this.

Oh. And you can also get $5.50 if you just show up. Like if you lack proof of purchase, you can still say, I probably had an ANW between 2016 and 2023, and I would like $5.50. Where do you have to show up? And I couldn't. It seems like they're done distributing, but that was the judgment. Yeah. Ah, nuts. Well, I'm not mad about it. I feel like, yeah, get that money. They lied. They lied to us about old vanilla. Yeah. Like, I really just think this is A&W messing themselves up. Like, I don't blame the sewers at all, even though this is kind of silly.

No. Like, why did A&W leave this option out there? It's definitely not aged vanilla. that. Look, if we can't, if we can't sue companies for silly lies, then we start to lose the ability to sue them for the dangerous lies. So I'm, I'm 100%. It's true. Team, sue them lying about old vanilla. Yeah, yeah, 100%. It's great. Yeah. And then we have one last number here that brings me a lot of joy. It's about yet another famous rupeer brand. The number is June of 2024. So last year. And by the way, if folks find a 2025 version of the contest, please post it on Discord

because it'll be amazing. June of 2024 is when the annual world's ugliest dog competition awarded their winner. And this was sponsored by the mug, a brand of root beer. Yeah, because mug, dog. And I sent Katie a picture of the winner. They're really fun. Because like Mug's root beer has like a, I'm. I mean, depending on, a dog on it.

And I wouldn't call him ugly. He's like a bulldog, I think. I guess it depends on your taste in dog attractiveness, which is not something I wish I had just said. But like, yeah, so there's like the dog on the mug. Also, it's because there's dog's mug on the mug. Right. It's kind of a face implied thing. Like, look at your mug, says a mobster or whatever.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it works on multiple levels because mugs also contain root beer. Yeah, and the story is truly delightful to me because it is sort of an accidental dovetailing of a root beer brands and a very positive charity thing for dog rescues and dog shelters. This contest sponsored by mug, it's at the Sonoma Marin Fair in Petaluma, California. Yeah. Apparently been happening since the 1970s was the first one. annual. And it's the idea is that no dog is ugly. Every dog needs a home. Yeah. In 2024, an eight-year-old Pekingese named Wild Fang won the judge's prize. Oh, I love Wild Thing. The people's vote went to a

14-year-old pug in a wheelchair named Rome. You know, look, I think all creatures should be loved. And I love things like naked mole rats, but I'm not going to pretend that naked mole rats are beautiful. they're not they're very ugly but i still love them and there are like a lot of dogs in these competitions that have teeth that are just like higgledy-piggledy they're like half bald and their faces are just sort of like uh salvador's dolly's persistence of time painting so it's really you know i i think it's like the beauty comes from within the dog not necessarily their faces And yeah, all of this contest and philosophy is happening independently of root beer since the 1970s and in California and people have had the idea elsewhere too. Completely separately in the 1870s, somebody starts a small producer of ginger ails and carbonated water in the Bay Area.

And the company is named Belfast. I couldn't find exactly why my guess is people from Belfast, Northern Ireland were involved. And according to the San Francisco Chronicle, that got bought out repeatedly. It never became a hires root beer-sized business. But in the 1940s, Pepsi kind of takes it over, and they say, what do we use this very old brand for? And they say, let's do a root beer with an old vibe. The initial name is Belfast, old-fashioned mug, root beer. Like, isn't it old-fashioned to have your root beer in a mug rather than space age stuff?

Right. Yeah, space age root beer doesn't sound cool. I want Prospector root beer. Yes, basically. And then several more branding changes happen, different logos, different adjustments of the name Belfast, old-fashioned mug root beer. And by the 1980s, they've dropped Belfast, and it's pretty much just old-fashioned mug root beer. And then in 1986, they make it simply mug of root beer, and they add a Bulldog mascot.

My favorite part is that apparently the name of the Bulldog mascot character is dog. It's just dog. Yeah. So, yeah, so that weird brand progression happened to dovetail with that region having a contest to promote dog adoption. And now mug root beer sponsors the world's ugliest dog competition. It's great. Incredible. So Dog the Dog's visage is behind the pictures of the winning dogs.

yeah oh man i'm looking at another picture of wild thing uh i love i love this dog i really don't think it's ugly though it is just an incredible looking like the the the hair is everywhere it's just a good time it's got a flippity floppity tongue that sticks out uh a lot and just like sort of an Ewak face. It's in no way ugly, but it is fantastic. Yeah, that's really good. Like, I have, look, I, I do keep abreast of the ugliest dog competition. And there are some dogs who are like nightmare fuel dogs. I still, again, I still love them. It does not, it does not impact. If anything, I'm like, yeah, this demonic looking dog, like, I want to be friends. with it because it does look like a tiny

gremlin yeah yeah maybe wild thing can go to like Westminster or something and be the first crossover winner yeah I'm way like like I am definitely not into like Westminster I think that the ugliest dog competition

should declare war on the Westminster dog show and the Yucanuba Cup like there should be just a takeover there we go yeah Folks, that is the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways.

Takeaway number one, root beer is a name for colonial North American drinks. imitating Native American teas made from the root bark of sassafras or sasparilla or both. Also, a fermentation step that especially colonizers did is why beer isn't the name at all. Takeaway number two, the first commercial root beer, Hires' root beer, was the first big soda pop brand in American history, and caused a public conflict between two leaders in alcohol prohibition. Takeaway number three, almost every modern root beer is an artificial simulation of what the drink used to be, partly due to a 1960s cancer concern. And then I had us to wrap up with numbers and stats and we could talk about root beer floats, the new alco-pop kind of actually alcoholic root beers, and then a bunch of the major root beer brands, let us know on the Discord if you have other ones you want to talk about. Those are the takeaway.

Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is cocaine wine. It has more to do with soda than you'd think. Visit sifpod.fund. Fund for that bonus show for a library of more than 21 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org.

Key sources this week include digital resources about the botany of those roots from the Cornell Botan. Panic Gardens and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. Also a lot of excellent print journalism from the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper, the Seattle Times newspaper, Philadelphia Magazine, academic resources from the McGill University Office for Science and Society, and more writing from the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, SeriousEats.com, gastro-obscira, and more. That page also features resources such as native-lashland.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie Lanoppe people and the

Wapinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategook people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join that Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 49. That's about the topic of postal codes.

Fun fact there, so many Americans resisted the use of zip codes when that was first introduced. The White House had to get badgered into using them. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Buddos band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that?

Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network. Artists' own shows Supported directly by you.