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

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Fan favorite Ask Gastropod is back, and we’re celebrating the season by solving a pair of trans-Atlantic mysteries! First up: if you have a purple candy in Europe, it’s nearly guaranteed to be flavored with a tart little berry called blackcurrant—while the same color candy in the US is almost always grape. One intrepid Gastropod listener wanted to know: why the difference? We’ve got the story of how a tree so important it was on early Americans coins inspired the botanical witch hunt that made a delicious fruit illegal this side of the pond—and how to try the fabulous flavor we're missing out on! Plus, lager and ale lovers around the world would be deeply confused by the warmly spiced soda that Americans call “root beer.” So where did this non-alcoholic beverage come from, what are these mysterious roots, and why is it called beer? It’s a tale of tea, teetotalers, and a ubiquitous ugly baby—and because we at Gastropod will put our stomachs on the line to get to the truth, we attempted to brew the original recipe to taste it for ourselves.

Episode Notes

Lily Hislop

Lily Hislop is the black currant and elderberry breeder for the Savanna Institute, an organization focused on agroforestry research and education in the Midwestern US.

Greg Quinn

Greg Quinn helped overturn the New York State ban on blackcurrants, and now farms them and sells currant products under the brand name CurrantC.

Left, sparkling blackcurrant berries; right, a 1952 advertisement for Ribena, a ubiquitous British black currant drink.

Bill Double

Bill Double is a freelance writer and author of the book Charles E. Hires and the Drink That Wowed a Nation.

Reed Andrew

Reed Andrew is the executive director of the Museum of Root Beer in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin.

The mysterious package of Hires Root Beer extract, courtesy of the internet, your hosts used to brew up their own root beer, with... mixed results. (Photos by Nicola Twilley)
The famous (or infamous) "ugly baby" advertisement for Hires Root Beer, circa 1892. (Image credit: The Hagley Museum)

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics

This episode of Gastropod was supported by a generous grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics. Check out the other books, movies, shows, podcasts, and more that they support here.