True story: Back in 1950 my father, who’d grown up in east Tennessee, was in the FBI, assigned to New Jersey. He was about 24 at the time. He and some other agents went to lunch at a café, apparently on duty. After food orders at the café were taken, the waitress asked what everyone would drink. Dad’s fellow agents all asked for “Birch Beer. “Dad, never having heard of “birch beer” before, asked for Miller High Life, to collective shock of the other agents!
It’s only through that story that I know of the existence of birch beer.
Pennsylvania is it’s home. I first had in Maryland before age 10, available everywhere in Eastern PA, parts of Jersey and New York, and even here in RI, but not everywhere.
I like it. I can be hard to find, but Walmart and Albertson’s both carry it (sometimes). If you drink it in a glass, it makes a good conversation piece: people notice the deep red color, and wonder what on earth you are drinking. Around Halloween, it sparks a lot of vampire jokes.
When I travel and am looking for fast food I will always stop at a Roy Rogers if I see one as it’s the only fast food place I know that sells birch beer.
This is topical for me - Just this past Saturday I was driving up to Smicksburg, a local Amish community, and stopped at a country store that sold Kutztown brand pop. I bought a birch beer and a root beer. The birch beer I thought was okay but I really liked the root beer. It looks like from their website that they carry saspirilla; I’d have bought some if they’d have had it.
The only beer I like is actual beer. Can’t stand the taste of root beer, birch beer, etc. My husband absolutely loves it and gets almost giddy if he sees it somewhere, but I just don’t see the appeal. It tastes like you’re licking a tree.
I can get Boylan’s Creamy Red Birch Beer at the Treasure Island near my apartment. They carry a selection of Boylan’s but I don’t seem to recall the non-creamy non-red Boylan’s Birch Beer there.
I was just on a trip to Seattle and my friend pointed me to a local store called The Root Beer Store. I tried plenty of beverages that were new to me and the two best were Gale’s Root Beer and Myers Avenue Red Root Beer, bot of which are bottled in Illinois but I can’t find it them here (I live in Chicago). The third best among my new sampling was Olde Brooklyn Birch Beer.
It is similar to root beer but (in theory) it uses an oil extracted from birch bark while root beer uses (in theory) an extract from the roots of the sassafras tree.
Oil of birch is chemically very similar to oil of wintergreen, so imagine root beer with some wintergreen-like flavors.
I like it, but that’s at least partly because its rarity makes it a novelty. If it were regularly available, I don’t know if I’d drink it any more than root beer.
