I consume a lot of drink mix, mostly sugar free.
When I was a kid a lot of companies made a root beer flavor. They weren’t sugar free but they were good.
Today you can get any flavor you want, sugar or sugar free, but not root beer. Why not?
because it tastes exactly like pepto bismol
No it didn’t.
You’re thinking of Birch Beer which tastes like root beer mixed with Pepto and transmission fluid. Sick, but I like BB. It’s an acquired taste for sure. But I don’t recall it ever being available in a powdered drink mix.
When I was a kid there was Wylers, Kool Aid, Flavor Aid, Funny Face, Aunt Wicks, etc… And they all made a root beer drink mix. Now I can’t find a single brand that does.
In the spice isle of a super market you may find a bottle of root beer extract. Looks like a mini bottle. Will make five gallons of root beer. Use a few drops for a glass. You will have to add a sweetener.
In a previous life, we would add the extract, water, sugar, and yeast (to make it fizzy). Bottle and cap it. It was fizzy in one month. In modern times, people would add dry ice for instant carbonation.
My guess is it wasn’t very popular because it tasted like a completely flat root beer. I think decades ago this wasn’t so much a problem because there still existed people who generationally hadn’t been basically raised on carbonation as the norm. But after the seventies or so this stopped being the case.
That would have been my guess, too. A cola-flavored drink mix would sound odd to me for exactly the same reason.
My older brother used to make root beer, using an extract from Hires. It used yeast to provide the carbonation. It was pretty good.
That’s one of the odd things about cola flavor: it just doesn’t taste that good in any context that doesn’t have carbonation.
I am sure there’s someone out there who loves flat cola, but in general, even cold, fresh but flat cokes just taste… sickly sweet and “off.” Flat root beer is at least tolerable.
I was addicted to root beer Kool Aid and still look for it. I think a lot of people gave up on it because it wasn’t all that great freshly made. The next day it was delicious. Until production of root beer Kool Aid is resumed, I simulate it by buying the cheap store brand root beer pop and defizzifying it. Much better flat, poured over crushed ice.
flat root beer wasn’t popular.
homemade root beer is great. watch it so that you don’t let it over carbonate.
When I read the thread title I assumed it was asking why there are no alcoholic mixed drinks made with Root Beer. I can’t think of any either.
I Google search yields some interesting choices…
I had an old Mr Boston’s bartender guidebook that had a root-beer flavored drink that used a combination of lots of different liqueurs such as bitters, anise, orange, vanilla, etc. I tried to make it once, but it was strangely, well, strange. And strong! I’ll have to see if I can dig up the book.
The other thing the others on this thread don’t realize is, the root beer Kook Ade made GRE****AT homemade popsickals. And with summer coming up it’s on my mind!
Wasn’t there a recipe for root beer fudge on some of the envelopes?
I preferred the Root Beer Kool-Aid over some of their other flavors, but that doesn’t mean much. Searching on the subject it appears to have been a 70s thing, and that’s where I remember it from. We had the Wyler’s mix. It had something in it that made it foamy. I tried making it with soda water one time and it produced a volcano of root beer foam. The flavor was weak though, and it needs real carbonation to be appealing. I made real root beer once from extract. It was ok, not worth all the trouble. We get IBC Root Beer around here, still in the glass bottles. It’s nice to have one of those once in a while on a hot day.
it was a 50’s/60’s/70’s thing. Last I remember it was sparsely available in the 80’s.
The Wylers seemed to be the only one that foamed up much. Yeast? Carbonate?
Maybe some carbonate and something that increased the surface tension. I don’t think yeast could react that quickly.
wiki: In 1960, safrole, the aromatic oil found in sassafras roots and bark that gave traditional root beer its distinctive flavour was banned for commercially mass-produced foods and drugs by the FDA in 1960.[8] Laboratory animals that were given oral doses of sassafras tea or sassafras oil that contained large doses of safrole developed permanent liver damage or various types of cancer.[8] While sassafras is no longer used in commercially-produced root beer and is sometimes substituted with artificial flavors, natural extracts with the safrole distilled and removed are available.[9][10]
I have seen alcoholic Root beer in a bottle just once, but alcoholic Ginger Beer is now at BevMo in two brands.
Yes. Root beer is my favorite drink, by far. I can finish off any other soda once it goes flat, but the place for flat cola, including root beer, is down the drain. It needs carbonation to fulfill its potential.
There is, however, a root beer flavored liquor