Monday, December 29, 2008
Beer the root of all soft drinks?
Tom Angleberger
The New River Valley-based reporter answers your questions Mondays in his column, What's on Your Mind?
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Q: Is root beer beer?
Mike O'Sullivan, Blacksburg
A: Before we can answer that, we have to decide whether root beer is root beer. By which I mean: Is the high-fructose, artificially colored, carbonated water that we typically drink from plastic bottles really root beer?
Real root beer is in fact beer, owing to the fact that one definition of beer, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is "a beverage made from extracts of roots and plants." Even if you want to insist that beer must have alcohol, root beer may still qualify because it can be fermented and bottled in a way that results in a mixture with up to 10 percent alcohol, according to a Mother Earth News recipe I found.
Here's an older recipe for real root beer to give you an idea of what we're talking about, because likely most of us have never tasted it:
"Sassafras root. Burdock root. Wild cherry bark -- of the root. Root of black alder. Spice wood.
"Boil several hours, strain and sweeten with molasses or sugar; add when blood-warm, sufficient yeast to ferment it. When it ferments, it is fit to drink. A little ginger and hops helps it much."
That's from "The Farmers and Emigrants Complete Guide," published in 1856. According to the guide, root beer was "excellent medicine for diseases of the blood."
Possibly because of difficult-to-follow recipes such as that one, there was a market for an easier way to make root beer. According to the "Encyclopedia of Junk Food and Fast Food," root beer was sold commercially in the 1840s. And in the 1850s, one could buy a syrup to mix with soda water.
Finally, in the 1870s, a pharmacist named Charles Hires began to sell Hires Root Beer Household Extract, which could be used for home brewing.
Then he started selling the actual product in bottles, which now seems like the obvious thing to have done all along.
According to the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, which now sells Hires Root Beer, Charles Hires was originally going to call it "root tea," but was convinced that "root beer" would be more popular. In the book "Sundae Best," author Anne Cooper Funderberg suggests that Hires was part of the temperance movement and was following the instructions of a clergyman who told him that "miners were more likely to drink manly beer than a wimpy tea."
(That may be the case, but the phrase "root beer" was in use long before then. There's even a mention of it in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The House of the Seven Gables.")
The question you asked -- "Is root beer beer?" -- became a matter of great importance to Hires. According to Funderberg, a wing of the temperance movement decided that his root beer was "no less sinful than any other beer." He finally came out on top when a laboratory reported that there was more alcohol in homemade bread than in the type of root beer Hires was making.
And so, the potentially potent home-brew had become a safe, mass-produced soft drink -- well on its way to becoming the high fructose "root beer" of today.
Q: I purchased a product that has a notice on the electric cord warning that it contains lead and that lead is known to the state of California to be a health hazard. My daughter and son-in-law say it's nothing to worry about, but it's got me kind of scared.
Maggie Stevens
A: "The cords are safe to handle and use," Virginia Department of Health spokesman Phillip Giaramita told me, noting that "as a precaution, people should wash their hands after using the cord. Children, of course, should not handle electric cords."
You may think that this is one of those crazy California things -- and it is -- but that doesn't mean the tags are useless. According to California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, manufacturers are using safer materials to avoid the tags.
Got a question? Got an answer? Call Tom Angleberger at 777-6476 or send an e-mail to woym@roanoke.com. Don't forget to provide your full name, its proper spelling and your hometown.
Look for Tom Angleberger's column on Mondays.
