Sure, but almost no one says Coca-cola tastes like medicine.
When I was kid, many, many years ago, my dad and my uncle would get root beer concentrate, Hires IIRC, and make their own root beer. I grew up with it and like it. I also remember once my dad took me out into the woods and we dug up a sassafras bush (or small tree) and used it to make a drink of some kind that tasted like root beer. I kinda liked it, but not much. I also like Dr. Pepper, but they don’t taste the same at all.
For the record, I don’t much care for colas, although I like Coke better than Pepsi when that’s all that’s available. I just find them boring.
My soft drink of choice these days is Sunkist Cherry Limeade, if that tells you anything, although we also have some Barq’s root beer and Cherry Dr. Pepper in the fridge.
Incidentally Vernor’s is not root beer, it’s ginger ale, which is a whole 'nother debate.
Vernor’s: not a root beer. Or does the Vernor’s company make a root beer I don’t know about?
Dennis the Menace (the American one) drank root beer. Me too.
Feh, I screwed up. Old memories. Pay me no mind. 
I like it and have never noted any medicinal taste. Interesting thread for me, as I’ve never noticed anything minty or cough syrupy.
Must be noted, however, I AM from the US and I DID drink root beer, birch beer, cream soda as a child.
Also, while I don’t drink much these days or soda in general, I don’t really do the Mug/A&W/Barqs. The most mass market stuff I will drink is Stewarts. And I like Sprecher.
I expect that the taste can be acquired as an adult. But it’s much harder to acquire a taste in adulthood, in general, than as a child.
Surely, on a board as contrarian and diverse as this one, there’s someone who first tasted root beer as an adult, but grew to like it?
MY GF from Mexico never had root beer until she came here at the age of 32 with her two small children. She tried and hated it. I introduced her son to it at a young age, most likely at A&W Root Beer and he loves it to this day and ask for it everywhere we go (he’s now 22). His younger sister never liked carbonated drinks so she never tried it as a child. She tried it in her late teens and didn’t like it.
Myself, I’ve been drinking it since an early age and love it. I recall having a Frostie root beer from a young age and thinking this stuff is great. I also loves me a root beer float.
I love both root beer and Dr. Pepper. If my stomach could still tolerate carbonated drinks I’d be drinking them. They don’t taste at all medicinal or weird to me - I was raised on them.
I especially love those fancier, artisan brands of root beer that you sometimes find nowadays. My husband will occasionally have one at a BBQ place near here, and I’ll have one or two cautious swigs from it. Yum.
My wife first tasted it as an adult and she thinks it’s fine. Not great, but fine. She probably likes it more than I do.
Someone once told me that it tastes a bit like toothpaste and I can sort of detect a hint of that.
Once, as a leader at a scouting campout, we brought about eight different brands of root beer, including a few from some local specialty bottlers. We then ran a taste test to see if we could find which one was the scouts’ favorite. What we found instead was that the boys didn’t really like root beer, leaving more for the adults to enjoy. It appeared to be a generational thing.
I’ve loved it all my life. Until I started reading on the World Wide Web that it’s an American thing, I never would have imagined that there wasn’t a human alive who would not find it delicious.
mmm
I grew up with root beer (Dads). I have enjoyed Dr. Pepper, especially the cherry flavored kind.
That was then.
I do not and will not dronk any soda or pop.
A&W was the popular drive-in restaurant in the small town where I lived when I was young and I liked it then. As an adult I have consumed it extremely rarely if at all [nowadays I almost never drink soft drinks at all anymore].
What we kids liked to order at the A&W stand was “swamp water” - half root beer, half orange soda. It wasn’t on the board, but they knew what it was. It looked terrible - I guess that’s what we liked about it.
Lord.
dronk.
When I was young my parents didn’t keep soda in the house often. So we liked going to my grandparents because grandpa would give me and my sister a bottle of Dr. Pepper. We didn’t even have to share, so I developed a taste for Dr. Pepper early.
I also remember the Christmas I was in fourth grade. We were opening presents and Dad suggested to my sister and I that we should go downstairs and get some Cokes. We ran fast because this would be a real treat. And standing there were two bicycles, one for each of us! We ran back upstairs shrieking, without the Cokes even.
Just like the Federation!
In my town, we called those “suicides”. I preferred about 3/4 root beer, 1/4 orange soda.
I’m from the UK. You didn’t see Dr Pepper until perhaps 84. I liked it, it was different from the bland taste of coke and pepsi. Most people didn’t. It was common and easy to find after that.
Some people say it tastes of prune juice.
I also found Root Beer for sale in a Macdonalds around 87 in Reading. For this reason I liked Macdonalds for a while, the Root Beer drew me in. I loved it. I’m not sure exactly when Macdonalds stopped selling root beer in the UK, if they do, it’s not everywhere, though they did try and localise a bit and you could get Irn Bru in Scottish Macdonalds.
Nobody else I know likes it. Yes, it smells a smell of Germoline (antiseptic cream) or Raljex (a muscle pain spray), but I still love it.
Having long since given up sugar, I’ve struggled to find Diet Root beer, in the the states when visiting. I’d scour places and find two bottles in a gas station somewhere. Never in the supermarkets or Walgreens. Only place I’ve seen an A&W shop was in Vancouver, but putting 2 litre bottles of fizzy stuff in my luggage to go in the planes hold did not seem an option, so I had a few to drink when there. You can find it mail order here, and it’s not cheap.
The biggest difference to me is that Barq’s has a lot of caffeine, and most brands of root beer don’t. So I don’t drink Barqs. It tastes fine, though.
I had sassafras tea as a kid at camp. I liked root beer more as a kid than as an adult, because it’s Sooooo sweet. But other than being too sweet, I like the flavor.
I don’t like Dr. Pepper. I first tasted it as an adult. It also has the caffeine problem.
Hmm, it does smell a little like wintergreen. I happen to ADORE wintergreen flavor, so much that I even grow a little wintergreen. (The leaves are bitter, but have a strong flavor of wintergreen as well as the bitterness.) I love wintergreen candies. But yeah, a lot of muscle/pain creams smell like wintergreen. Maybe that’s the issue. Early associations matter a lot to tastes. I can’t drink vodka. I used a lot of 95% ethanol to clean glassware before I ever drank it, and the first time I brought a glass of vodka near my face all I could think was “cleaning solution”. Not an appetizing association.