By 1893, root beer was distributed widely across the United States. In 1886, Hires began to bottle a beverage made from his famous extract. However, his desire to market the product to Pennsylvania coal miners caused him to call his product "root beer", instead. Hires was a teetotaler who wanted to call the beverage "root tea". Hires developed his root tea made from sassafras in 1875, debuted a commercial version of root beer at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, and began selling his extract. Pharmacist Charles Elmer Hires was the first to successfully market a commercial brand of root beer.
Ī Hires' root beer advertisement from 1894 The tradition of brewing root beer is thought to have evolved out of other small beer traditions that produced fermented drinks with very low alcohol content that were thought to be healthier to drink than possibly tainted local sources of drinking water, and enhanced by the medicinal and nutritional qualities of the ingredients used.īeyond its aromatic qualities, the medicinal benefits of sassafras were well known to both Native Americans and Europeans, and druggists began marketing root beer for its medicinal qualities. It possibly was combined with soda as early as the 1850s, and root beer sold in stores was most often sold as a syrup rather than a ready-made beverage.
Root beer has been sold in confectionery stores since the 1840s, and written recipes for root beer have been documented since the 1860s. European culinary techniques have been applied to making traditional sassafras-based beverages similar to root beer since the 16th century. Sassafras root beverages were made by indigenous peoples of the Americas for culinary and medicinal reasons before the arrival of Europeans in North America.