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From Wikipedia:
Root beer is a beverage made from a combination of vanilla, cherry tree bark, licorice root, sarsaparilla root, sassafras root bark, nutmeg, anise, and molasses among other things. Each root beer has a unique recipe. Root beer constitutes about 3% of the American soft drink market. Many local brands of root beer exist and home-made root beer is made from concentrate or (rarely) from roots.
Other ingredients may include allspice, birch bark, coriander, juniper, ginger, wintergreen, hops, burdock root, dandelion root, spikenard, pipsissewa, guaiacum, spicewood, yellow dock, honey, clover, cinnamon, prickly ash bark, yucca, quillaja, and dog grass.
Due to the wide variety of ingredients possible the flavour of root beer is widely variable between brands. This is especially true of local brands.
Really tough to describe the flavor, but it's nothing at all like ginger beer. Ginger beer can be really spicy, to the point that you have to drink it in a certain way to avoid hurting your sinuses. It's delicious, though (and, according to wikipedia's article, can be mixed with actual beer, which obviously I am going to go try as soon as I'm done here). Root beer has a much milder flavor, which tends to be fairly creamy. Wintergreen's usually a distinctive flavor, in my experience especially with locally-made brews. There's often some sort of sour action going on too, though I can't pin it down. As the article mentions, there's a ton of variability. If you're interested and you can find it, Loomis (I don't know where you're based), you could do a lot worse than A&W- it's the best of the large brands, in my opinion. |
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I guess I'm stuck without tea for 6.5 more hours.