America's Forbidden Fruit and Forgotten First Soda: Ask Gastropod

23:41In the case of most berries that are sweet, you can't unsweeten a raspberry or a strawberry, you know, and so in the case of currants, I could sweeten them to the point where I could still get sweet notes and tart notes, which wasn't possible in a lot of other fruits. Because black currants are really not all that sweet right off the bush. They're quite tart. And I love that. I just love the flexibility of these little black gorgeous things. Greg came back to America. He left both the military and the culinary world, and he got into horticulture. And after a short period of time, I ended up teaching at the New York Botanical Gardens, which I did for about 25 years.

24:19And during that tenure, I discovered that black currants were illegal in the United States. This is not totally true. They were illegal, but by the 1960s, the white pine industry wasn't as big of a deal. The lumber industry had basically moved on, and the whole ribes quarantine and eradication effort had run out of steam. Because it turns out that all that huge effort to eradicate black currents hadn't actually succeeded in eradicating the disease. Plus, as we said earlier, researchers in Canada had developed varieties of blackcurrant bushes that were resistant to white pine blister rust, and that led to a change in the American law.

24:57Upon the release of those, the United States went, well, I guess this is a little pointless. It didn't super work. There's still white pine blister rust in the landscape, and we haven't been able to get rid of it. And now black currents have the ability to not get it. So I guess we'll get rid of the ban. And then just kind of did it quietly. And so the federal government, as it often does, kicked the restrictions and the law to states jurisdiction. So they said to every state, you decide for yourself whether you want to grow these or not. About a dozen states kept some form of restriction or ban.

25:31The rest quietly took the ban off the books. But New York State, where Greg lives, that was one of the states where blackcurrants were still totally forbidden. In the early 2000s, Greg decided he was ready to start his own farm. He and his wife found property in the Hudson Valley, and he was looking for a specialty crop, one that not everyone was growing and that would make him enough money to keep the farm afloat. As part of his research process, he visited other small-scale farmers in the region who were making a go of it. One of them was a local vintner, and one of his products was cassis, which is black currant liqueur.

26:04And I asked him, because I knew at this point that they were illegal, I said, where do you get your currants? And he said, oh, it's a real pain in the butt. I have to go to Canada and import them, and, you know, I wish that we had them here. And a little light went off, you know. I love it when someone tells me that it's illegal and banned and you can't do it. Greg headed up to Cornell to get some help with figuring out what to do next. He checked in with plant pathologists there. They looked into whether the ban was necessary. And they said, well, there aren't a lot of white pine plantations in the state, and we now have resistant black currants.

26:33So the ban maybe wasn't so important anymore, but the law was still on the books. How do you change a law? I have no idea. I'm not a lawyer. But I went up to Albany, to the state capitol, and I spoke with a couple of people. I spoke with one senator in the beginning, a state senator. and he said, so, you know, how big is the market for black currants? And I said, well, there is no market. It's illegal. You know, there's a couple imported jams, but that's about it. And he said, well, that's not good news. How many farmers? I said, well, it's illegal. There's no farmers. He said, so there's no source of supply and there's no market and I'm going to spend my time changing this law.

27:08It makes no sense. Greg kept going up to Albany each and every week to pester the lawmakers and then the Wall Street Journal heard about him and decided to write an article about his quixotic effort. And it was terrible. It talked about how bad currants tasted. They were tart. Americans were never going to love them. All this stuff. This is 100 % fake news because the black currant tastes delicious. But you know what they say. There's no such thing as bad publicity. And the following morning, I got a call from a state senator way out in western New York who was on the Agricultural Committee. And he said, I read the article.

27:43I'm intrigued. Let's talk. and that was the beginning. And we spent six months crafting a new law. It went up for a vote before the assembly and passed unanimously. The first law that passed unanimously in something like 40 years. The following week it went up before the Senate and passed unanimously and two months later then Governor George Pataki signed it into law and I overturned the ban in New York. Greg became a black currant and also a red currant farmer. He has thousands of plants, he sells some of them to local farms so they can grow black currants too. He also has a whole bunch of currant products, from frozen fruit to juices to jams and chocolate-covered black currants, everything your heart desires.

28:23Lily says for a small-scale grower like Greg, black currants have a lot of potential. Growing blueberries, you're going to be competing against the super-efficient growers of Georgia and Florida and the Pacific Northwest, and you're going to be competing against Chile. And those are really tough margins. But if you're growing a crop that doesn't have a lot of acreage already, That's really appealing to people. Plus, these fruit have been popular for so many decades across the ocean. There's plenty of existing knowledge for American farmers to take advantage of. Black currants have already had the benefit of breeding in Europe and already have a pretty established industry over there.

28:58And they have figured out a lot of these challenges and they've made things like mechanical harvesters. So finding the intersection of crop that's not razor thin margins, but has an industry support network and like tools already developed for it is such a such a boon. For the Savannah Institute, where Lilly works, black currants have another big thing going for them. They grow really well in partial shade, like under solar panels, for example, or alongside trees in what's called an agroforestry system. Agroforestry is the implementation of more trees on farms that can look like diversified orchards or alley cropping or wind breaks.

29:40It can look like any number of systems. And we like agroforestry because it's good for the soil and it's good for the air quality and water quality and it diversifies the income of farmers. That all sounds awesome. Black currents fit into that system perfectly. But the problem is, as we already said, almost nobody here knows about them. There are some Americans growing them in their backyards. There have also been like small farms growing them here and there, mostly people who had also fallen in love with blackcurrants either in Europe or maybe in Canada where they're more common. But there really isn't a market for them.

30:12Americans are not clamoring for blackcurrants. Yet. So for a farmer to grow something without a market, you have to be certifiable, which is what qualified me to do it. And I decided in the beginning that because there was no market, I wanted to make sure that I marketed currants the way that I wanted people to perceive them. So a delicious fruit, a healthy fruit. So black currants have twice the antioxidant of blueberries. They have four times the vitamin C of oranges, more potassium than bananas, calcium, iron, manganese, magnesium, and this little berry that Americans didn't know about. You know, it's really a powerhouse.

30:52Americans do love their health benefits. But Lily is focusing on the flavor aspect. She says most black currants are a little too tart to eat right off the bush, and she's trying to change that for the American palate. By breeding currants that are delicious and great for eating out of hand and are maybe a little bit less pungent, a little bit more sweet, you know, kind of a little bit more blueberry-like, and that work well for our climate and for our growing systems. And we're also trying to increase the marketing of black currants and get people to know more about it. This is the real challenge.

31:27For more than a century, Americans have lived without the black currant. Purple means grape here, but Lily thinks it can be done. She thinks the black currant could stage a comeback. There was no mango flavored products 20 years ago, probably. But people are, you know, it's very common to find now. You can find a mango-flavored Mountain Dew or gummy candy pretty easily. And so I think that trajectory could be similarly adopted for black currants. Just people need to know about them, have the opportunity to try them, be curious, which they already are. You might be wondering, why bother? Sure, black currants are great, but there's lots of great food around.

32:05You can find all sorts of delicious options at the farmer's market and in the grocery store. We don't need no more stinking berries. we've already invented all of them it's fine yeah no if you listen to gastropod you already know why we should bother because making life more delicious is if not the key at least a very big contribution to overall human happiness there's a reason that i work on berries and i don't work on wheat or corn is i love being someone who gets to create joy and like sparkle in the world. And black currants are joy and sparkle. You don't need it to live. It is not a vital nutrient where if you don't eat a black currant specifically, you will die.

32:53But we know that fruits and vegetables are good for us and they have delightful flavors. And it just provides texture to life that makes life full of curiosity and joy and sparkle. I'll raise a glass of cassis to that. Speaking of sparkle, Well, now it's time for the next listener question. This one about a sparkling soda root beer. Why is it called beer? What is it actually supposed to taste like? Is it really made from roots? All that after the break. Is Donald Trump still cool? Well, at first, there's what he was promising to America. He was promising change. Yeah, promising a big change. Has he lived up to that?

33:32No. No, I wouldn't say so. I'm disappointed. We're in Washington, D.C. for one of the events that Donald Trump is throwing for America's 250th anniversary, and it's UFC night. Proud to be American. We got free tickets. It's just going to be a great time. That's about it. It's an opportunity to talk to a group that was central in the 2024 election, young men. Why do we think Trump and men seem to have a connection? I feel like he just knows how to advertise himself as a young and proud. It aligns with masculinity, I feel like, to a certain extent. But if they don't like Donald Trump, what do they prefer politically otherwise?

34:06I care about my family. I care about my country. I want people to be safe and happy where they live. I care about my wallet too, man. I'm Estet Herndon, and this is America Actually. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. As America reaches its 250th anniversary, how should Americans assess their country's strength relative to the rest of the world? We're moving into a genuinely multipolar world, and that's a world in which every nation is basically for itself, because nations can no longer rely on the United States to protect them. I'm John Feiner. And I'm Jake Sullivan.

34:42And we're the hosts of The Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, we sat down with historian and foreign policy expert Bob Kagan to assess America's role in the world at 250 and the future of American power. The episode's out now. Search for and follow The Long Game wherever you get your podcasts. The hero of the story of root beer used to be a household name in America, but not anymore. He was a South Jersey farm boy called Charles Hires, who left home in 1863 at the tender age of 16 to apprentice in a pharmacy in Philadelphia. Hires first struck it big when he discovered something super useful.

35:21There was a basement being excavated in downtown Philly, and he noticed that the earth that had been dug up was a clay called Fuller's earth, which even today is used for cleaning. These days, it's in things like cat litter. Heirs persuaded the builder to let him have the excavated earth for free instead of schlepping it to a dump. And then he packaged it up and sold it as a fabric cleaner, and he made enough money from this free dirt to start his own business. And at that time, druggists were looking for drinks that they could prepare in their shops, and sell over-the-counter. Bill Double wrote a book called Charles E.

35:56Hires and the Drink That Wowed a Nation. Druggists at the time sold all sorts of concoctions, things that were medicinal, and also beverages that claimed to be medicinal. He was just starting out, and he was looking for a drink that he could merchandise. Hires had just got married, and his honeymoon ended up combining business with pleasure. He was staying with his new bride, I think he was 24 and she was 23, at a farm near Morristown, New Jersey. And the hostess prepared him a drink that was described as homemade root beer. He found it very, very interesting. The drink that Hyers enjoyed was something that his hostess had made from foraged teaberry leaves and both the berries and pieces of the root of the sassafras tree, which is a tree that's native to North America and had long been enjoyed in a steeped drink by Native Americans.

36:50You dig up that root and snap it, and you're going to feel like you're smelling a root beer straight out of the ground. Reed Andrew is the founder of the Museum of Root Beer in Wisconsin. These roots of the sassafras tree are kind of like a rhizome-like ginger, and the resulting spicy warm beverage had a reputation as a cural. When Europeans were introduced to the sassafras root, they went wild for it. it was the most lucrative export from the colonies in the early 1600s. The Jamestown colonists legally had to send 30 tons a year to the King of England as part of their charter. Like we said, Native Americans had long been steeping the root like a tea.

37:28But colonists and early Americans, like the woman who hosted Hyers and his wife, they added some sugar and yeast and let it ferment a bit, which made it lightly sparkling. It was part of the world of incredibly low-alcohol drinks that were made with farged leaves and roots and berries and all sorts of flavors. You could get ones flavored with spruce needles or birch bark or just regular hops or a climbing vine called sarsaparilla or, of course, our friend the sassafras root. These sparkling drinks were typically in the range of 1 % alcohol, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, which is how they ended up being called small beers.

38:05Normal, non-small beers typically start at at least 4 % alcohol. For small beers, you took all these flavorings, hops, birch, sarsaparilla, whatever, and you could either use the sugar that was provided by leftover grains from brewing beer, or you could use sugar sugar and then just briefly ferment it all together. The whole process created delightful, refreshing, low-alcohol drinks that were often seen as safer to drink than water at the time. In any case, the young, newly married pharmacist Charles Heyers very much enjoyed his first taste of sassafras root small beer. He thought it had real promise, and he cut the recipe for it, and he took it home with him, and he worked on it for almost a year until he found a product that he thought he could put on the market.

38:51Hayers never shared his exact recipe, but Bill says we do know he did include the farmer's wife's tea berry leaves for their wintergreen note and sassafras root and berries, but then he added things like juniper, sarsaparilla, hops, ginger, vanilla, licorice. There were apparently 16 ingredients in all. The result was a drink with a taste that was described as woodsy and minty and a little medicinal. Heyers created a dried powder from all these ingredients, and starting in 1875, he packaged and sold his Heyers root beer extract. And you just had to buy his package of roots and herbs and add sugar and yeast, and it would make five gallons of delicious root beer.

39:32During the whole recipe-tweaking R &D process, Hires always referred to the resulting beverage as root tea, or sometimes herb tea. He was a lifelong teetotaler himself, and he claimed this was a teetotal drink. But Hires had a friend who said Pennsylvania miners would never buy and drink something called root tea. It just wasn't manly enough. There were a lot of miners in Pennsylvania at the time, and Hires was too good a businessman to shut off part of his potential customer base. It would not be as cool if it was called Root Tea. It might not even exist anymore if we went with that name. Coolness or lack thereof aside, Heyer's Root Beer started to really take off, especially when Heyer started selling a liquid concentrate version in 1880, which it turns out you can still find.

40:21I managed to order a very ancient-looking, still-sealed package from that source of all wonder, the internet. We have no idea how old that package actually is. It's unlikely that it's part of his original batch from the 1880s. We do know that in general, this liquid extract was made and sold all the way through the 1980s. But that bottle looked older than something from my childhood, to be honest. It was old. No idea how old. The liquid concentrate had sort of turned to cement in the bottle, so it took an absurdly long time to get it out. And then I popped it in the blender to re-liquidize it.

40:56It was a project. Now I have sort of grainy black sludge. It really does look like some kind of petrochemical waste product. Smells very intensely of root beer. Nikki spooned half into a tiny little glass jar and shipped it all the way across the country to me in Somerville so we could both have the delight of attempting to recreate this original Hire's root beer from scratch. I know this is ancient, and I don't know if it's toxic at this point, but it really smells like root beer. It's kind of shocking. I did read the ancient instructions that came with the ancient package. It says, do not use more yeast than specified, otherwise the drink will be unpalatable.

41:42I sense it may be unpalatable whatever I do, but we've got to give it our best shot. But it turns out that not for the first time in my life, I did not read the instructions closely enough, and I added the yeast directly to the sugar sludge mix, which was wrong. Oh damn, I was supposed to bloom that in water instead. I also read the instructions, and like Nikki, I attempted to follow them. The instructions said to bloom the yeast, specifically in lukewarm water, so I asked my spouse Tim, who's a baker, and he said to warm the water a little. I did that, and then I bloomed the yeast. Add to the sugar, mix well, bottle immediately.

42:20It should be someplace relatively warm, well that's the house right now, two to three days after being bottled. Maybe keep them in the tub in the guest bathroom in case anything explodes. Alright, here we are. Successfully bottled and now I'm putting the caps on. Good luck, brown liquid. I wish you well. We set our freshly made Hires root beer aside to ferment for a couple of days and return to the late 1800s. Heyers very smartly moved on from this method, and in 1884 began selling a sweetened syrup version of his extract for use in brand new soda fountains, which were the cool new thing. And he was two years ahead of what became the most famous drink from that time, Coke.

43:05In fact, Heyers Root Beer was one of the very first commercial soda fountain soft drinks. And unlike his rivals, Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Moxie Nerve Tonic, Heyers never put anything in his root beer to give it more pep, other than sugar, of course. Root beer never had caffeine or cocaine or any of the other pep-producing popular ingredients of the day. What his root beer did have was one of the earliest advertising budgets. He was riding on a streetcar one day to work, and a gentleman who knew of his root beer came down and sat down beside him. It turned out to be the editor of the Philadelphia Ledger, and he said, that root beer is good, why don't you advertise it?

43:50Myers said he couldn't afford to pay for advertising, and the editor said, well, how about we run your ads and I won't send you a bill until you ask for it? Myers was willing to take a chance on that, and when he got the first bill, it was$700. He nearly fell off his seat. But he looked at his sales and he saw it was working. He stuck with it, and he advertised it, and he kept advertising it, And he exaggerated it very, very strongly as the world's greatest health-giving beverage. Famously, most Heyers root beer ads starred what came to be known as the Ugly Baby, an illustration of a random blonde German toddler-age kid who only his mother, and apparently Charles Heyers, could love.

44:35The face of this child was on everything. There's one face of a baby who's crying because the root beer was taken away. A crying, ugly toddler baby doesn't seem like it would attract new customers. But Heyers Root Beer got huge, and as it did, Heyers reinvested money in advertising, which was a virtuous circle of success because that advertising kept on working. By 1910, Heyers Root Beer was one of the most popular drinks in the country. It was up there with Coke. I would say that Root Beer rivaled every soft drink for the first 20 or 30 years. Despite that early success, Heyer's Root Beer never took over the world.

45:15Colas like Pepsi and Coke, and then the lemon-lime sodas like Sprite and 7-Up, they were the real juggernauts. Root Beer may not have been as popular, but it did stick around over the decades as a soft drink option. The Heyer's brand, though, it was sold a couple of times. And in the end, Dr. Pepper Keurig Corporation purchased Heyer's Root Beer, and they phased it out. Reed remembers his last sip of the original Hire's Root Beer with fondness. I pressed the Hire's button on a little soda machine next to a gas station in a small Wisconsin town. I thought, yeah, that's Hire's. And I had no idea it would be my last drink of Hire's.

46:00As of now, it's going to be the last one, unless somebody can get another batch made. Fear not, though, hires may be gone, but root beer hasn't disappeared. At least not in America, which is really the only place that root beer ever was and is popular. Root beer's not number one, but it's a mainstay. It is consistently a part of American life. But growing up in England, I never encountered it. And I've literally had a woman from the UK in the museum make a disgusted face when tasting root beer. And her and her husband said, ew, it's like we're at the dentist. In America, where we don't think it tastes like you're at the dentist, A &W is the most popular root beer today, but there are lots of root beers.

46:50Most of them are made with artificial flavors, just like all soft drinks. But there are also craft root beers that are actually brewed with roots and herbs and things. I realized while I was making my own Hire's Root Beer homebrew that I had never actually tried a root beer. My only experience of the flavor was root beer flavored jelly bellies. So I decided to fix that by going to my local soda pop emporium, which stocks about 50 different kinds of root beer. I may have got a little carried away. Yeah, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. And if you include this asperola that I already had in my fridge, yeah.

47:29Wow, I have four. I did go a little nuts. But it's my first time. We decided to start our root beer tasting session with the homebrew because, well, I was a little terrified that we were going to poison ourselves and I wanted to get it out of the way. I just hope it doesn't kill us. I mean, I don't... You know I'm an optimist, but I fail to see how it could actually kill us. That said, it did look really pretty dubious. But listen, we will do almost anything to bring you this show. We didn't know how carbonated it would have gotten after a couple of days of fermenting, so we carefully opened the tops.

48:01Ew! It smells really revolting. Holy moly, is all I have to say about that. I don't think I've smelled anything so bad. It was like putting my nose in a sewer. Holy, holy. It is gross. Wow, Cynthia, are we really going to drink this? That smells so bad it's intense. But we did. We each poured a delicate serving out over some ice, took a deep breath, and tried it. Cheers, Cynthia, it's been real. Okay, I'm going to take a tiny sip.

48:28I just spit it back in the glass. Oh, mine tastes like way better than it smells. It's quite, I mean, it's got that medicinal root beer wintergreen thing, but it's perfectly palatable. I'm going back for a second sip. Ugh, definitely not. Tastes about as bad as it smells. It's a really light carbonation. It's not too sweet. It's quite delightful, actually. Huh. Maybe when I messed up the instructions, I ended up with something new and I would drink this. I'm guessing that I used too much yeast because half of the printed recipe meant using one-sixth of a teaspoon, and that was really hard to measure.

49:07And if you'll remember, too much yeast makes the resulting drink unpalatable. Or, I mean, totally disgusting. We thought it was only fair and reasonable to try the most popular root beer next, A &W.

49:22smells totally like root beer just what i expected to smell like there is a whole lot more bubble going on that tastes like root beer i don't really know how to explain it other than it tastes like root beer it has that rooty earthy bit it's very sweet this a and w i would never drink it's it's like syrup it is and the winter green note is really a little much then we tasted the ones that were actually made with real roots and other botanicals. We each had a different brand, but we both thought they were an improvement. Oh, nice. Balanced. This one is like, I'm lovely with a bunch of things going on.

50:00This one for me is the closest to my hires in that it's just feels like a refreshing, slightly spicy herbal tincture. Yeah. It's still a little too sweet, but... This to me isn't spicy. It's spiced, but it definitely is like that. That's what I mean, and like warm. That was peak root beer. And then I kept going and things went downhill from there. One root beer tasted too much like vanilla. One was too gingery. All were way too sweet and none were anything I'd ever voluntarily drink again. I know they all have their fans and I'm sorry. But our listener Rachel wanted to know the difference between root beer and sarsaparilla soda.

50:40The original Hire's recipe did have sarsaparilla in it, but we each got a bottle of sarsaparilla to see what it was like straight. It tastes a lot like root beer. It feels like a little more, mine is a little more musky and a little more tannic. But really, in a blind taste test, I'd be hard pressed. Which is not surprising because sarsaparilla and sassafras taste remarkably similar and in fact were often used together or interchangeably throughout the history of these root beverages. Honestly, the world of small beer was kind of a free-for-all, and we're just living with the chaotic flavor consequences.

51:16If you're curious about what sassafras and sarsaparilla have to do with both MDMA or ecstasy and the Smurfs, you'll want to get a hold of our upcoming newsletter for our special supporters at gastropod.com support. Huge thanks to listeners Rachel and Russell for such fascinating questions, and to our experts Lily Hislop, Greg Quinn, Bill Double, and Reed Andrew for helping us answer them. We have links, etc. at gastropod.com so you can learn more and, of course, get a hold of some black currant-y goodness yourself. Thanks, as always, to our fabulous producer, Claudia Geib. We'll be back in a couple of weeks.

51:51Till then.