What is in Root Beer?
A Few Fun Facts About Root Beer
There's is no true authentic root beer recipe, since there are so many different combinations and brews. Over time, root beer has contained ingredients like allspice, birch bark, coriander seed, ginger and ginger root, hops, burdock root, dandelion root, guaiacum chips, spicewood, wild cherry bark and bitters, wintergreen and wintergreen oil, yellow dock, prickly ash bark and even, molasses.
Today, root beer is made from a mixture of flavorings, sweeteners and carbonation. Depending on the brew, bottler and manufacturer, root beer still contains a large number of herbs (burdock root, sarsaparilla root, yellow dock root, ginger root, juniper berries, wild cherry bark, birch bark, and etc.), oils (anise, lemon, artificial wintergreen, and etc.), sweeteners (sugar, molasses, corn sugar, fructose, asparatame, brown sugar, lactose, malt extract, and etc.) and carbonation (yeast, artificial, forced carbonation.)
Fun Facts about Root Beer
Root beer was one of the original flavors of Kool-Aid. It was made from 1955 to 1957.
During prohibition, root beer was known as the "Great American Temperance Drink".
In 1996, Thomas Kemper Sodas set the world record for the world's largest root beer float in Seattle, WA. It entered the Guiness Book of World Records at a whopping 2,166.5 gallons. The feat took a 4,000-ton carbonating tank and 900 gallons of ice cream (donated by a local dairy).
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