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Root Beer Syrup (II)
American Concentrated Root Beer Syrup, 1 quart; Plain Syrup, 3 quarts. 4421 ROOT BEER STEINS.
Every store sells soda nowadays. Competition has taught people to expect pure soda from a fine fountain.
This is a fountain dispensing formula rather than a from-scratch recipe: a bought concentrate cut with sugar syrup to working strength. The paragraph that follows the two lines belongs to a separate entry (No. 4421) and has been carried over from the column beside it.
- The ratio is the whole recipeOne part concentrated extract syrup to three parts plain syrup, giving one gallon of finished fountain syrup. Everything depends on the strength of the concentrate you start with.
- Plain syrupThe soda fountain's standard stock syrup: a heavy sugar syrup dissolved with heat and strained, considerably denser than a modern 1:1 simple syrup. The book gives no proportions here. That density is part of what kept a fountain syrup from fermenting in the jar.
- "American Concentrated Root Beer Syrup"A proprietary trade article, not a generic ingredient. Modern root beer extract sold in small bottles is far stronger than a fountain concentrate of this era, so a 1:3 cut will be overwhelming; dose by the bottle's own directions and adjust to taste.
- Drawing the drinkFountain practice of the period generally called for something in the range of 1 to 1 1/2 fluid ounces of finished syrup in a glass, filled with carbonated water. A gallon of syrup would therefore yield somewhere around 90 to 128 glasses.
- CarbonationThe syrup contributes nothing fizzy. Use well-chilled seltzer under pressure and pour onto the syrup so it mixes without stirring away the gas.
- Keeping itStore cold in glass. Thinning the plain syrup toward 1:1 to reduce sweetness also reduces its preservative effect, so it will spoil sooner.
- Sassafras, if you make your own extractTraditional root beer flavor rested on sassafras root bark, whose safrole the FDA barred from food use in 1960. Commercial extracts today are safrole-free; wild-dug sassafras root is not.
Root beer began as a small-beer of the American household — a lightly fermented brew of sassafras, sarsaparilla, wintergreen, birch bark and molasses, sweet and barely alcoholic — and was pulled into commerce in the 1870s by Charles Hires of Philadelphia, whose powdered and liquid extracts are conventionally credited with making the name a national one. By the time of a fountain manual like this, the drink had shed its fermentation entirely: it was a flavored syrup plus carbonated water, drawn to order, and the dispenser's job was arithmetic rather than brewing. That shift explains the stray sentences beneath the formula, about competition and the public's expectation of pure soda. The temperance-adjacent respectability of root beer and the rise of the drugstore fountain moved together, and a shop's reputation rested on clean apparatus and honest syrup rather than on any secret of the recipe.