NYBarfly.com- 3.21.11
Alcoholic Root Beer Hits NYC
It’s official, folks: at long last, the misnomer root “beer” has graduated into Root Beer. This new brew, appropriately (or unimaginatively?) is called Root, and had so far only been available if you lived near the plant in Pennsylvania – so, to no one. But now Root is finally on the way to your friendly NYC bar, and all we can say is, what the hell took so long? Is New York not the largest city in America? Get that up here! Gothamist interviewed Steve Grasse, the drink’s creator:
It’s like nothing else out there. Usually things that are root beer flavors are liqueurs or vodkas and it’s all done with synthetic syrups as opposed to botanical ingredients. And of course we wanted to take it a step further and make it organic. The thing we found out though is that what was in all these recipes was sassafras and you’re not allowed to use sassafras anymore because safrole oil is a known carcinogen. Who knew? What we did is experimented and found out that wintergreen, spearmint, orange and lemon peel mixed together creates the same flavor.
And our personal favorite note:
We took liberty and greatly increased the alcohol content as I wanted to create something that drank more like a whiskey.
We couldn’t be happier with this trend of liquor-fying childhood snacks. Attention booze companies! Can you line up some Smarties with tequila or Yoo-hoo with Kahlua? We’d totally be into that, too.
-Katie Carroll
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