The first settlers in America could not buy drinks such as they had had in England, and in a new country they often could not make them. So they found of making other drinks in place of them: root beer.
The recipe, contained 2-12-percent alcohol, and was considered a light, social drink made from herbs, berries and bark.
Other beverages of the time included birch beer, sarsaparilla beer and ginger beer. Root beer was brewed in colonial times from a variety of substances first used by Indians for healing purposes.
Ingredients in early root beers included allspice, birch bark, coriander, juniper, ginger, winter green, hops, burdock root, dandelion root, spikenard, pipisissewa, guaiacum chips, sarsaparilla, spicewood, cherry bark, yellow dock prickly ash bark, sassafras root, vanilla beans, hops, dog grass, molasses and licorice.
Only root beer would emerge as a longtime favorite. In Pennsylvania, sassafras oil was used to flavor beer, which became known as root beer. When the soft drink version of root beer became popular, sassafras oil remained a key ingredient.
In the nineteenth century, American cowboys often ordered ‘sarsaparilla’ or root beer because it was both the most widely used treatment for syphilis and was also considered a male aphrodisiac.
History of Root Beer during American Colonial