I love it when you guys ask me to cover specific topics for this Thing. I especially love it when it’s a topic for which I don’t have immediate answers floating around in my useless trivia files. (If you have something you’d like me to discuss, please leave a comment!)
So when my bestie asked why his grandmother makes root beer at Easter, I was 50% baffled and 50% absolutely freakin’ thrilled.
Guys, is this a thing? I did a lot of digging (this is a pun) and I don’t have any particularly conclusive answers. But I do have a lot to say, which is My Brand™.
Root beer, for my friends who aren’t in North America and may not know, is a soft drink traditionally made with sassafras root bark (or sarsaparilla, which is usually considered a separate drink). Indigenous peoples made many medicinal beverages using roots and barks, and they definitely made use of sassafras and sarsaparilla. The arrival of colonizers brought brewing techniques that added carbonation and foam to what would otherwise just be sassafras tea.
Hires Root Beer was the first commercially successful root beer on the market. A pharmacist and teetotaler, Charles E. Hires wanted to sell the stuff as “root tea” (despite the low-but-nonzero alcohol content), but trying to market to Pennsylvania coal miners led him to embrace the word “beer.”
The USFDA banned safrole – a carcinogenic component of sassafras – for use in commercial food production in 1960, so most root beers on the market now use artificial flavoring (or a sassafras extract with the safrole chemically removed). But homebrewers often still use sassafras, liver integrity be-damned.
So why brew the stuff on Easter?
One answer would be the tree’s dormancy period. In the winter, the sap goes down in the roots, making the root bark more potently flavored. In late winter and early spring, the root bark comes away more easily, as well. This requires digging up fewer roots, which is good for the plant and your back. Sap begins to flow in early spring, which would make a better flavor yield from the tree bark itself while still having some reserves down in the roots.
So harvesting in time for an Easter brew would actually make perfect sense!
Another possible explanation is the overlap in cooking. Root beer glazes are a popular way to make a sweet, flavorful, delicious, luscious, stupendous, wonderful… yummy… crackly…
Sorry, what? Oh. Ham, right. Root beer is also a tasty way to rehydrate a country ham and counteract some of the salt while enhancing the smoke flavor. (I’m just torturing myself now.)
But even if your family cook doesn’t use root beer outright, the ingredients for a homebrewed root beer and a ham glaze tend to overlap – the molasses and spices, mainly.
ANYWAY. To answer the question, my best guess is that it was a hand-me-down timing from when/if anyone in the family harvested their own sassafras. And you’d want to get it brewed before the start of root beer float season, that’s for sure.
It also was probably just something that made Eastertide a little more special. Homebrewing a drink is a fairly laborious process, so it would’ve been basically a bottle of love. And ain’t that what Easter’s all about? (Along with ham.)
Did you drink (or brew!) root beer on Easter? If not, can we make this a thing? It seems like the perfect drink to bridge winter and spring. And just imagine the looks of people when you tuck a bottle of root beer in their Easter basket! Don’t explain – just do it. (If you’re not likely to brew your own, might I suggest Not Your Father’s for the alcohol drinkers in your life?)
I wanna pay attention to what you're writing but my brain is just exploding with the thought of ROOT BEER FLAVORED PEEPS ...WHAT??!!
The only thing bringing me back down to earth is the reminder that peeps in general are a never-ending source of disappointment. I've never encountered a peep that was even remotely fresh. I think they age them in a warehouse. The ones we're seeing right now were "hatched" last year. 🙃