This is a transcript of the Gastropod episode Ask Gastropod: America’s Forbidden Fruit and Forgotten First Soda, first released on July 7, 2026. It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.
RACHEL BROUGH: My name is Rachel Brough, and I live in Wichita, Kansas. And I was calling to ask some questions about root beer. So I don’t drink alcohol, but I do love a root beer, and I was discussing this with a friend one day and we had so many questions.
CYNTHIA GRABER: Yes, that’s right, it’s time once again for your listener questions! It’s the summer edition of Ask Gastropod, and we are Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I’m Cynthia Graber.
NICOLA TWILLEY: And I’m Nicola Twilley. And once again, you have sent us down some very intriguing rabbit holes. Rachel got in touch about a drink you’ve probably never heard of, unless you’re American. Turns out even Americans are confused about it.
BROUGH: Where did it come from? Why is it called beer if it’s not alcoholic? What’s the difference between root beer and sarsaparilla? Is ginger beer related? And why are there so many varieties that taste so different? I feel like they’re all pretty different in their flavor notes.
GRABER: And listener Russell Taylor of Austin, Texas, wanted to know about blackcurrant, which is a flavor that many many people in the world love—unless you ARE American, in which case you’ve probably never tried it!
RUSSELL TAYLOR: I’ve seen it only occasionally in things like, you know, relatively fancy imported preserves, here. But in Europe it’s, you know, the default flavor. That’s what purple is over there, just like grape in the US. So why is it common over there, fancy-seeming over here in the US, and, why did this difference occur?
TWILLEY: Russell and Rachel, your wishes are our command. Stay tuned and all will be revealed. This episode was supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the public understanding of science, technology, and economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
[MUSIC]
TWILLEY: When I first came to the United States to study, in my early twenties, many things shocked me. The fact that people said zero instead of nought. The fact that no one understood I meant two weeks when I said a fortnight. And of course the purple candy.
AMERICAN SINGERS: Skittles, skittles, bite sized candies, taste the rainbow of fruit flavors.
BRITISH SINGERS: Skittles! Taste the rainbow of fruit flavor!
GRABER: Here in the US, Skittles comes in five flavors: lemon, strawberry, orange, lime, and grape. In the UK, Skittles also comes in five flavors: lemon, strawberry, orange, lime, and… blackcurrant. Blackcurrant! Not grape!
TWILLEY: Yep. Mind blown. Our Starburst, which by the way used to be called Opal Fruits, they also come in a range of fruity flavors including blackcurrant. Whereas your Starburst? You don’t even have a purple, you just have that dark red cherry one.
GRABER: When it comes to purple flavored things—gum, fruit drinks, hard candy—if you buy it and it’s purple in America, it’s nearly always grape flavored. And in England it’s basically always blackcurrant. Two countries separated by a common language and a purple fruit.
TWILLEY: I don’t want to cast shade here but it is actually kind of hard to find an American who even knows what a currant is.
LILY HISLOP: I saw one researcher give the ballpark estimate of 0.1%, like, might have tasted a currant.
GRABER: Lily Hislop is a tree crop breeder at the Savanna Institute, which is in Wisconsin. She works on breeding blackcurrants.
HISLOP: Now, there’s always the little bit of confusion that I get with zante currants, because people are like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve, I have had them in scones and stuff.” And zante currants are not the same thing as blackcurrants.
GRABER: Zante currants are literally just raisins, but they’re a particular KIND of raisin.
HISLOP: They are raisins made from Corinth grapes, which is a black, small grape that is grown in the Corinth region of Greece.
TWILLEY: At some point in the past, to English ears, Corinth sounded like currant. So the little dried raisins from Greece became known as currants. And then when actual Ribes fruits like blackcurrants started to be grown more widely, they were also little round dark things that looked kind of like the little dried raisins, so people called them currants too. But they’re not the same thing, at all.
GRABER: So what is a blackcurrant, if it’s not a dried grape from the Corinth region of Greece?
HISLOP: They are a black berry that’s a very deep color that has almost, like, a galaxy-like quality ’cause it has these little specklings. And it tastes kind of like a blackberry and a pine tree together. It has this deep, jammy, dark berry flavor and a little bit of, like, of a resinous quality. And they’re pretty tart. But they’re very unique.
TWILLEY: Blackcurrants are just one currant in an extended family of fruity delights, they’re all part of a plant family called Ribes.
HISLOP: There’s also white currants and red currants, which are part of the same species. It’s just a matter of pigmentation.
GRABER: Well, not just pigmentation, they do also taste different.
HISLOP: I describe red currants as just pomegranates on a bush without all the work. It has that, like, beautiful zing and, like, kind of the big seeds that, like, is reminiscent of pomegranate. It’s, like, the mouth-watering quality of it. Oh, I love red currants so much.
GRABER: White currants are a little sweeter and less tart than red ones.
TWILLEY: There’s also pink currants for people who can’t decide between red and white. And then there’s the currants’ oversized relative, the gooseberry, which looks like a hairy grape, and tastes tart and fruity and amazing in both pie and chutney form.
HISLOP: And then there’s probably… between 250 and more than 300 species all over the world, and they’re on every continent, except for Antarctica.
GRABER: Historically, currants of all varieties have been foraged all over the world, wherever they’ve been found, but Europeans have been particularly enamored of them. Blackcurrants seem to have been cultivated intentionally in Russia as early as the 900s, and then they seem to have been popular around most of northern Europe by about the 1500s.
TWILLEY: That’s when people started deliberately selecting plants with the biggest and tastiest fruits to grow in their own gardens, to harvest and turn into jams and jellies and cordials and chutneys. My granny made jars of blackcurrant jam for me every year when I was little.
HISLOP: And it’s a very good jam. It’s, like, got a complexity to it that blueberry jam or, like, grape jam doesn’t have. It’s really delightful. It’s got, like, such a bright tartness to it.
GRABER: European settlers brought a lot of their favorite crops with them to North America, including blackcurrants, and in fact currants of all varieties. Currants seem to have shown up in about the 1600s.
TWILLEY: And by the late 1800s, redcurrants, blackcurrants, and gooseberries—they were being grown all over the northeast and upper midwest.
HISLOP: If we’re lumping currants together with blackcurrants and red currants… before the ban, there was about 7,400 acres of currants growing in the United States, including both black and red. And that’s about on par with how many acres of blackberries are growing today.
GREG QUINN: And in fact, New York State prior to the ban in 1911, as states go, was the largest cultivator of currants. Although back then it was red currants. And again, people would cultivate it mainly for jams and jellies.
GRABER: Greg Quinn is a current currant farmer in New York. He grows both red and black, but he grows far more black than red.
TWILLEY: But wait a minute. The ban? What is this 1911 ban that Greg and Lily are talking about? Books, alcohol—those have been banned, sure. But fruit?
GRABER: To understand where the blackcurrant ban came from, we have to talk trees. White pine trees in particular. Which I promise is going to make sense in a minute.
QUINN: When the first settlers came over, the northeastern part of the United States—and by northeastern I mean Michigan to Maine to Virginia—that whole swath of land was covered with ancient white pine trees. Pine trees that were 265 feet tall. Now, to put that into perspective, the largest redwood is 360 feet tall. So these were enormous trees.
TWILLEY: These humungous white pine trees were extremely useful for the early colonists.
QUINN: You simply cut down a white pine. It’s softwood, so it’s easy to get through. You chop off all the branches and you’ve got, you know, lots of boards. You can make wooden log cabins. You can make furniture out of it. It was great to burn ’cause it had pitch.
TWILLEY: The white pine was so important that one of the first coins issued in the colonies was the white pine shilling.
QUINN: You know, these were really big deals.
GRABER: And of course like most things that we got super enthusiastic about using in America, we…used it up. We cut down so, so many of the white pines, particularly on the east coast—like about 80 percent of the trees in Vermont and nearly as many in New York state. We really went to town on them.
HISLOP: And in the early 1900s, late 1800s, it seems like folks in New England decided that was a bad idea, and maybe we shouldn’t have done that. And there was demand for timber, and for stabilizing the soils that were beginning to erode really dramatically in New England.
QUINN: And so in, in the late 1800s, the US government formed what’s today known as the US Forestry Service. And the first business of the US Forestry Service was to reestablish white pines.
TWILLEY: At the time, Europeans had a flourishing baby tree growing business, they could grow baby trees more cheaply than Americans,
QUINN: And so as the story goes, 10 million white pine seedlings were collected and sent to Germany, which had a very robust nursery infrastructure. They propagated them into seedlings, sent them back on ships,
GRABER: And these baby trees were planted across the northeast! Great! But wait—there was a problem. These trees were infected with something called white pine blister rust. It’s a plant fungus.
HISLOP: So this fungus needs both pines and Ribes to complete its life cycle. It spends some time on the white pines, making spores, and then go to the blackcurrants, and then making spores there that go back and forth. So you need both of them.
TWILLEY: This white pine blister fungus had been doing its thing across Asia and Europe forever, but it wasn’t a super big deal until the American white pine came along.
HISLOP: It’s, like, a little inconvenient for a blackcurrant. It gets these orange pustules that kind of look like Cheeto dust on the underside of the leaves. But it, like, kills pine trees really dead. Like 75 to 95 percent of stands just eradicated by this fungus.
GRABER: American white pines, that is. Europeans did have pine trees, plenty of them, but they’d evolved with the disease and so it didn’t totally wipe them out. American white pines had no defense against this rust. Also blackcurrants are particularly susceptible to white pine blister rust. So when the two met, the American pine was kind of screwed.
TWILLEY: And remember, America had begun importing and planting out millions of baby white pine seedlings from Europe, where the infection was raging. Big whoops.
HISLOP: So in 1906, this fungus was first identified. And then they found it in a lot of other sites, and then they’re like, “Oh, crap. This is going to be really bad.”
GRABER: This was also a time when America was waking up to the fact that it was importing a ton of useful plants from all around the world—listen to our episode about David Fairchild for more—but we realized that some of these plants brought diseases and pests with them.
TWILLEY: All of this came to a head when the Japanese government gave a gift of ornamental cherry trees to be planted in DC, and all of them were infested with multiple different pestilent insects and had to be burned. Which was a major diplomatic incident.
GRABER: And because this took place in our nation’s capital, our nation’s government paid attention to the problem, and they passed a plant quarantine act in 1912.
TWILLEY: Which you can read all about in a certain book I co-authored all about quarantine, called Until Proven Safe. But the point is, the very first federal plant quarantine order in the United State was against white pine blister rust. White pine seedlings couldn’t be imported until they were shown to be free of disease.
GRABER: The problem is that white pine blister rust doesn’t show up until about three years after infection, so that wasn’t an effective solution. But at the same time, the federal government also launched a ban against planting all Ribes. They were particularly worried about blackcurrants.
TWILLEY: And when that still wasn’t enough, they decided to eradicate currants from the US landscape altogether.
HISLOP: Congress gave a bunch of money to the USDA and their, like, subsection about forestry. This was before the Department of Forestry was its own individual unit. And they formed a task force for eradicating Ribes in general. And this included pulling out farmers’ fields without compensating them. This included pulling people’s plants out of their gardens. This included going through the forests and finding blackcurrants and native currants and ripping those out with fire and herbicide.
GRABER: They hung the plants from trees to die. The native currants, though—those weren’t actually a real problem, they don’t transmit white pine blister rust as easily, but the government didn’t much care. They were on an anti-Ribes crusade.
HISLOP: They used the Civilian Conservation Corps to do this effort. They used war internees from Germany and Italy. They used prisoners. They used immigrant labor from Mexico. They used high school students. In 1934, they had 11,000 employed eradicators. So, like, this is a huge effort.
TWILLEY: Which meant no more delicious blackcurrants, or of course redcurrants or gooseberries for the American people! You guys just gave up on currants, to try to save the white pine.
HISLOP: Maybe people didn’t love blackcurrants enough. Maybe we didn’t have a large enough culture for it.
GRABER: But in Europe, they love blackcurrants a lot. They do now, they did back then, and those little berries were more important than an imported American tree. They gave up American white pines and kept growing currants.
TWILLEY: Canadians were also faced with the currant vs white pine dilemma, and they chose…both!
HISLOP: While the US was really heavily investing in eradicating the currants, Canada took the opposite approach and went: “Ah, this disease is bad. Maybe we should learn more about it so we can stop it.” And so they did a bunch of interesting research, and they developed the first varieties that were resistant to white pine blister rust.
GRABER: Okay, so that’s why we lost blackcurrants in America but didn’t lose them in Canada and Europe. But to explain the candy difference, we have to go back to England in the 1940s. During World War II, shipping between countries was disrupted. England had been importing citrus for its high levels of vitamin C, but suddenly they couldn’t get it.
TWILLEY: But it turns out that blackcurrants have much more vitamin C than oranges, pound for pound. And blackcurrants grow really well in England, they don’t mind shade and cold.
QUINN: Now, there wasn’t a lot of producers of currant juice in, at the time. But a company, a small little pharmaceutical company called Beechams started to make juice. And they called it Ribena. After the botanical family of ribes, of course. And that’s really what put you know, currant juice and currants on the map.
SINGERS: Gulp, gulp, gulp, gulp. Ribena’s rich in vitamin C. Take a gulp! Ribena’s fruity and blackcurranty. Take a gulp! Stick in a straw and you will see. Ribena goodness is ready to gulp. Gulp, gulp!
QUINN: Ribena—as you know, growing up in, in the UK—Ribena’s a big deal. I mean, everybody, everybody drank Ribena. Everybody knows what Ribena is.
TWILLEY: Greg is correct. Ribena is everywhere in the UK, it is available in cartons and bottles and as a cordial to mix with water, its in every newsagents and vending machine and supermarket, and it’s not alone. There are all sorts of blackcurrant flavor drinks.
GRABER: And candies. And here’s where the great divide occurred. In the 1960s and 70s, when a lot of these new artificially-flavored fruity candies and treats were being invented, our countries went two different ways.
HISLOP: That was around the time that we were really heavily… well, that we were starting to see the mass productions of food and the, like, kind of solidification of our flavor profiles for our countries. And so when we’re inventing Skittles, the Skittle flavors are basically the same between the two nations. Except the purple Skittle in the United States is grape, and the purple Skittle in the UK, and basically everywhere else, is blackcurrant flavored.
GRABER: And Lily’s a fan.
HISLOP: It’s a better flavoring than grape is. It’s a great one. [LAUGH] It’s so much more interesting.
TWILLEY: Bold words. I of course agree the British blackcurrant version of purple candies is best, but I will acknowledge some bias.
GRABER: There’s only one way to find out: candy taste test! That’s coming up, after the break.
[BREAK]
TWILLEY: All right, are we ready for today’s blackcurrant taste test?
GEOFF MANAUGH: We are absolutely ready.
TWILLEY: I mean, it’s not actually a blackcurrant taste test. It’s a… purple taste test.
MANAUGH: Okay. We’re tasting the color purple?
TWILLEY: We are indeed. It’s the purple candy transatlantic taste test you’ve all been waiting for. We got hold of British Skittles and American Skittles, and British Starburst and American Starburst, and then we recruited our long suffering partners, Geoff and Tim, to make this scientific.
GRABER: I’m going to close my eyes, and you are going to try me out on the Skittles, and I’m going to guess which is which. And then we’ll do with the Starburst.
TIM BUNTEL: Skittles first. All right. The Americans’ in the movie theater-like box. [BOX RATTLING] British in the little plastic bag. [CRINKLING]
GRABER: Okay, I’m going to close my eyes. Eyes closed. Okay, here we go.
[CHEWING]
GRABER: Totally blackcurrant. Not grape. Okay. So this is a different purple. Let’s see, let’s see if I’m pretty sure that this one is the grape one and that one was the blackcurrant.
[CHEWING]
GRABER: Yep. This one is totally the grape. I mean, does it taste like grape? It tastes like grape flavor. Whereas the blackcurrant just has a little more richness to it. This is just sort of that sweet grapey thing going on, like the Manischewitz grape flavor. Concord grape. Whereas the blackcurrant has, like, more depth and complexity even in Skittle form.
GRABER: And…drumroll…100 percent correct on my first try. Over to you, Nicky.
MANAUGH: Okay, I’ve moved them back and forth, so now you don’t know which one is which. And now I’m going to open them up.
[CRINKLING]
TWILLEY: [CHEWING] It’s very sweet. Okay. I’m not going to say anything until I’ve tried the other one.
MANAUGH: Okay, then palm out and… dun dun dun, dun. Candy two.
TWILLEY: All right, here we go. [CHEWING] Mmm. It’s easy. The first one is American, the second one is blackcurrant.
MANAUGH: Congratulations, you did it!
GRABER: The Starburst wasn’t a fair comparison because the equivalent in the American package is red, it’s cherry, but in any case Nicky and I both aced it. We knew which one was supposed to be blackcurrant.
TWILLEY: Frankly, the Starburst blackcurrant was not as delicious a representation of blackcurrant-ness as the Skittle. I went back and tried the blackcurrant British Skittle just to be sure, and then had another American purple skittle just for reference.
[CHEWING]
TWILLEY: MM. Ugh. The American one is… I feel, I feel sad for the children of America.
GRABER: It’s true, Americans are missing out, blackcurrant is a truly fantastic flavor, even in candy form. But, as we said, most Americans have never tried it.
HISLOP: I did not grow up eating blackcurrants. I hadn’t really heard of them before I got this job.
TWILLEY: Greg hadn’t either, he’d never tried them, but then he found himself in Europe.
QUINN: I was actually in the military. I was in a branch of the military, intelligence branch. And I was a Czech and Slovak linguist. And because of what I did with intelligence and so forth, I had a lot of free time.
GRABER: Greg fell in love with all the foods he was eating in Europe, all the fresh produce, all the delicious flavors—
QUINN: And after a short while, having this free time and, and having this newfound love of food, I decided to do exactly the opposite of what one does. Instead of going to school and learning how to cook and then opening a restaurant, I decided, “Let me open up a restaurant and I’ll learn how to cook.”
TWILLEY: So he did. And behind the restaurant he ran, in a little town in Bavaria, Germany, there were some blackcurrant bushes. Which is how Greg became acquainted with the blackcurrant. Acquainted, and very quickly obsessed.
QUINN: One of the first things that I loved about it was, as I was cooking, is I had, I had the ability to really play around with flavor. In the case of most berries that are sweet, you can’t unsweeten a raspberry or a strawberry, you know? And, 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.
GRABER: Because blackcurrants are really not all that sweet right off the bush. They’re quite tart.
QUINN: And I love that. I just love the flexibility of these little, little black gorgeous things.
GRABER: Greg came back to America, he left both the military and the culinary world, and he got into horticulture.
QUINN: And after a short period of time, I ended up teaching at the New York Botanical Gardens, which I did for about 25 years. And during that tenure, I discovered that blackcurrants were illegal in the United States.
TWILLEY: 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
GRABER: Because it turns out that all that huge effort to eradicate blackcurrants hadn’t actually succeeded in eradicating the disease.
TWILLEY: 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.
HISLOP: Upon 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 blackcurrants 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.
QUINN: 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.
TWILLEY: About a dozen states kept some form of restriction or ban, the rest quietly took the ban off the books. But New York state, where Greg lives—that was one of the states where blackcurrents were still totally forbidden.
GRABER: 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.
TWILLEY: 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 blackcurrant liqueur.
QUINN: And and 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 just 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.
GRABER: 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 blackcurrants.
TWILLEY: So the ban maybe wasn’t so important anymore, but the law was still on the books.
QUINN: How do you change a law? I have no idea. I’m not a lawyer. But I went up to Albany, to the state capital, 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 blackcurrants? 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? It makes no sense.
GRABER: 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.
QUINN: And it was terrible. It talked about how bad currants tasted. They were tart. Americans were never going to love them. All this stuff.
TWILLEY: This is one hundred percent fake news, because the blackcurrant tastes delicious. But you know what they say: there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
QUINN: And the following morning, I got a call from a state senator out—way out in Western New York who was on the agricultural committee, and he said, I read the article. I’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.
GRABER: Greg became a blackcurrant and also a red currant farmer. He has thousands of plants, he sells some of them to local farms so they can grow blackcurrants too. He also has a whole bunch of currant products, from frozen fruit to juices to jams and chocolate covered blackcurrants—everything your heart desires.
TWILLEY: Lily says, for a small scale grower, like Greg, blackcurrants have a lot of potential.
HISLOP: 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.
GRABER: 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.
HISLOP: Backcurrants have already had the benefit of breeding in Europe, and already have a pretty established industry over there, and 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.
TWILLEY: For the Savanna institute, where Lily works, blackcurrants 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.
HISLOP: Agroforestry is the implementation of more trees on farms. That can look like diversified orchards, or alley cropping, or windbreaks. It 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.
GRABER: That all sounds awesome: blackcurrants 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.
TWILLEY: But there really isn’t a market for them. Americans are not clamoring for blackcurrants. Yet.
QUINN: 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 blackcurrants have twice the antioxidant of blueberries. They have four times the vitamin C of oranges. More potassium than bananas. Calcium, iron, manganese, magnesium, in this little berry that Americans didn’t know about. You know, it’s really a powerhouse.
TWILLEY: Americans do love their health benefits.
GRABER: But Lily is focusing on the flavor aspect. She says most blackcurrants are a little too tart to eat right off the bush, and she’s trying to change that for the American palate.
HISLOP: 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 blackcurrants and get people to know more about it.
TWILLEY: This is the real challenge. For more than a century, Americans have lived without the blackcurrant, purple means grape here. But Lily thinks it can be done. She thinks the blackcurrant could stage a comeback.
HISLOP: 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 blackcurrants. Just people need to know about them, have the opportunity to try them, be curious, which they already are.
GRABER: You might be wondering, why bother? Sure, blackcurrants are great, but there’s lots of great fruit around, you can find all sorts of delicious options at the farmers market and in the grocery store.
HISLOP: We [LAUGHING] we, we don’t need no, no more stinking berries. We’ve already invented all of them. It’s fine. [GIGGLES]
TWILLEY: 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.
HISLOP: 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 blackcurrants are joy and sparkle. You don’t need it to live. It is not a vital nutrient where if you don’t eat a blackcurrant specifically, you will die. But we know that fruits and vegetables are good for us, and they have delightful flavors. And it, like, just provides… texture to life. That makes life full of curiosity and joy and sparkle.
GRABER: I’ll raise a glass of cassis to that. Speaking of sparkle, 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.
[BREAK]
TWILLEY: 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 sixteen, to apprentice in a pharmacy in Philadelphia.
GRABER: Hires first struck it big when he discovered something super useful. There 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.
TWILLEY: Hires 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.
BILL DOUBLE: And at that time, druggists were looking for drinks that they could prepare in their shops and sell over the counter.
GRABER: Bill Double wrote a book called Charles E. Hires 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.
DOUBLE: He was just starting out, and he was looking for a drink that he—he could merchandise.
TWILLEY: Hires had just got married and his honeymoon ended up combining business with pleasure.
DOUBLE: 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.
GRABER: The drink that Hires 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.
REED ANDREW: You 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.
GRABER: 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 cure-all.
TWILLEY: 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 thirty tons a year to the king of England, as part of their charter.
GRABER: Like we said, Native Americans had long been steeping the root like a tea, but colonists and early Americans—like the woman who hosted Hires 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 incredibly low alcohol drinks that were made with foraged leaves, and roots, and berries, and all sorts of flavors.
TWILLEY: 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 one percent alcohol, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, which is how they ended up being called small beers. Normal, non-small beers typically start at at least four percent alcohol.
GRABER: For small beers, you took all those 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.
TWILLEY: In any case, the young, newly-married pharmacist Charles Hires very much enjoyed his first taste of sassafras root small beer.
DOUBLE: He thought it had real promise, and he got the recipe for it and he took it home with him, and he worked on it for a—almost a year till he found a product that he thought he could put on the market.
GRABER: Hires never shared his exact recipe. But Bill says we do know he did include the farmer’s wife’s teaberry 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.
TWILLEY: The result was a drink with a taste that was described as woodsy and minty and a little medicinal.
GRABER: Hires created a dried powder from all these ingredients. And, starting in 1875, he packaged and sold his Hires root beer extract.
DOUBLE: 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.
TWILLEY: During 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 teetollar himself, and he claimed this was a teetotal drink.
GRABER: 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
ANDREW: It would not be as cool if it was called root tea. It might not even exist anymore, if we went with that name.
TWILLEY: Coolness or or lack thereof aside, Hires Root Beer started to really take off, especially when Hires started selling a liquid concentrate version in 1880. Which, it turns out, you can still find—I managed to order a very ancient looking still sealed package from that source of all wonder, the internet.
GRABER: We have no idea how old the package actually is, it is 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.
TWILLEY: 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 into the blender to re-liquidize it. It was a project.
TWILLEY: Now I have…a sort of grainy black sludge. It really does look like some kinda petrochemical waste product. [SNIFF] Smells very intensely of root beer. [SCRAPING]
GRABER: Nicky 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 Hires root beer from scratch.
GRABER: 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.
TWILLEY: I did read the ancient instructions that came with the ancient package
TWILLEY: It says, “Do not use more yeast than specified, otherwise the dr—the drink will be unpalatable.” I… [LAUGH] I sense it may be unpalatable whatever I do, but… we’ve got to give it our best shot, so.
TWILLEY: …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.
TWILLEY: Oh damn. I was supposed to bloom that in water instead.
GRABER: I also read the instructions, and like Nicky I attempted to follow them. The instructions said to bloom the yeast specifically in lukewarm water, so I asked my spouse Tim who is a baker and he said to warm the water a little. I did that and then I bloomed the yeast.
GRABER: Add to the sugar, mix well, bottle immediately. 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 [LAUGHING] in case anything explodes.
TWILLEY: All right, here we are. Successfully bottled and now I’m putting the caps on. Good luck, er… brown liquid. I wish you well.
TWILLEY: We set our freshly made Hires root beer aside to ferment for a couple of days and returned to the late 1800s.
GRABER: Hires 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. In fact, Hires root beer was one of the very first commercial soda fountain soft drinks.
TWILLEY: And unlike his rivals—Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, Moxie Nerve Tonic—Hires 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.
GRABER: What his root beer did have was one of the earliest advertising budgets.
DOUBLE: He was riding on a streetcar one day to work, and he, a gentleman wh-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?”
TWILLEY: Hires 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.
DOUBLE: Hires was willing to take a chance on that. And when he got the first bill, it was $700. He nearly fell off his seat.
GRABER: But he looked at his sales and he saw it was working.
DOUBLE: 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.
TWILLEY: Famously, most Hires root beer ads starred what came to be known as the ugly baby: an illustration of a random blond German toddler-age kid who only his mother and apparently Charles Hires could love.
ANDREW: the face of this child was on everything. There’s one face of a baby who’s crying because the root beer was taken away.
GRABER: A crying ugly toddler baby doesn’t seem like it would attract new customers, but Hires Root Beer got huge, and as it did Hires reinvested money in advertising. Which was a virtuous circle of success, because that advertising kept on working. By 1910 Hires Root Beer was one of the most popular drinks in the country, it was up there with Coke.
ANDREW: I would say that root beer rivaled every soft drink for the first 20 or 30 years.
TWILLEY: Despite that early success, Hires Root Beer never took over the world. Colas, like Pepsi and Coke, and then the lemon lime sodas, like Sprite and 7-Up—they were the real juggernauts.
GRABER: Root beer may not have been as popular but it did stick around over the decades as a soft drink option. The Hires brand, though, it was sold a couple of times.
ANDREW: And, in the end, Dr. Pepper Keurig Corporation purchased Hires Root Beer. And they phased it out.
TWILLEY: Reed remembers his last sip of the original Hires Root Beer with fondness.
ANDREW: I pressed the Hires button on a little soda machine next to a gas station in a small Wisconsin town. I thought, Mm, yeah, that’s Hires.” And I had no idea it would be my last drink of Hires. As of now, it’s going to be the last one, unless somebody can get another batch made.
GRABER: 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.
ANDREW: Root beer’s not number one. But it’s a mainstay. It is consistently a part of American life.
TWILLEY: But growing up in England, I never encountered it.
ANDREW: 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, “Eww, it’s like we’re at the dentist.”
GRABER: 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. Most 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.
TWILLEY: I realized while I was making my own Hires root beer homebrew that I had never actually tried a root beer. My only experience of the flavor was root beer flavor 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.
TWILLEY: Yeah… One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Ten if you include the sarsaparilla that I already had in my fridge, yeah.
GRABER: Wow. I have four.
TWILLEY: [LAUGH] I did go a little nuts. But it’s my first time.
GRABER: We decided to start our root beer tasting session with the home brew, because, well, I was a little terrified that we were going to poison ourselves, and I wanted to get it out of the way.
GRABER: I just hope it doesn’t kill us.
TWILLEY: I mean, I don’t… You know I’m an optimist, but I fail to see how it could actually kill us.
TWILLEY: That said, it did look really pretty dubious, but listen, we will do almost anything to bring you this show.
GRABER: We didn’t know how carbonated it would have gotten after a couple of days of fermenting, so we carefully opened the tops.
TWILLEY: Eww.
GRABER: It smells really revolting.
TWILLEY: Holy moly—
GRABER: Oh, no, this is—
TWILLEY: …is all I have to say about that. I don’t think I’ve smelled anything so bad. It’s like putting my nose in a sewer. Holy, holy…
GRABER: It is gross.
TWILLEY: Wow, Cynthia, are we really going to drink this? That smells so bad. It’s intense.
TWILLEY: But we did. We each poured a delicate serving out over some ice, took a deep breath and tried it.
[POURING, ICE JINGLING]
TWILLEY: Cheers, Cynthia, it’s been real.
GRABER: Okay, I’m going to take a tiny sip. Bleh! [SPIT] Dah! Geh! Yeah! Blegh! I just spit it back in the glass.
TWILLEY: 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, it’s perfectly palatable.
GRABER: Blegh.
TWILLEY: I’m going back for a second sip.
GRABER: Eugh. Definitely not. Tastes about as bad as it smells.
TWILLEY: 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.
GRABER: I’m guessing that I used too much yeast, because half of the printed recipe meant using ⅙ of a teaspoon and that was really hard to measure, and if you’ll remember, too much yeast makes the resulting drink unpalatable. Or, I mean, totally disgusting.
TWILLEY: We thought it was only fair and reasonable to try the most popular root beer next, A&W.
[TOP SCREWING OFF]
GRABER: Smells totally like root beer, just what I expect it to smell like.
[FIZZY POURING]
TWILLEY: There is a whole lot more bubble going on.
GRABER: And that tastes like root beer. I don’t really know how to explain it, [LAUGHING] other than it tastes like root beer. It has that rooty, [LAUGH] earthy bit. It’s very sweet.
TWILLEY: This A&W I would never drink. It’s, it’s like… syrup.
GRABER: It is very, very sweet.
TWILLEY: And the wintergreen note is really, a little much.
GRABER: 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.
TWILLEY: Oh, nice. Balanced.
GRABER: This one is like, “I’m lovely with a bunch of things going on.”
TWILLEY: This one for me is the closest to my Hires. In that it’s just feels like a refreshing, slightly spicy herbal tincture.
GRABER: Yeah.
TWILLEY: It’s still a little too sweet, but…
GRABER: This to me isn’t spicy, it’s spiced. But it definitely is like a—
TWILLEY: That’s what I mean, as in like warm.
TWILLEY: 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.
GRABER: But our listener Rachel wanted to know the difference between root beer and sarsaparilla soda. The original Hires recipe did have sarsaparilla in it, but we each got a bottle of sarsaparilla to see what it was like straight.
GRABER: It tastes a lot like root beer.
TWILLEY: 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.
TWILLEY: 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.
[MUSIC]
GRABER: If 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.
TWILLEY: 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 et cetera at gastropod.com so you can learn more, and of course get hold of some blackcurranty goodness yourself.
GRABER: Thanks as always to our fabulous producer Claudia Geib. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks, till then!