Liquid History

If not for Prohibition, would we have root liquor instead of root beer?

by Trey Popp

Dominic Savini FLOAT ON: Imbued with notes of tobacco, vanilla and allspice, Art in the Age's ROOT is unlike anything you have in your liquor cabinet.

[ booze ]

What would the world be like if Hitler had taken Moscow? If Lee had won at Gettysburg? If the '93 Sixers hadn't blown $44 million to make 7-foot-5-inch Shawn Bradley the second-tallest guy on the team?

All good questions, but if you're a serious drinker, here's a better one: What else would be in your liquor cabinet if Prohibition had stalled in 19th-century New England?

Steven Grasse has an answer. The Philadelphia ad man and history buff thinks the drink that's come down to us as root beer might have evolved in a completely different direction — one ending not in sugary soda but something rather stiffer. Local tipplers will soon get the chance to taste his theory. It's an 80-proof organic liqueur called ROOT, and it's debuting in Philadelphia liquor stores this month.

American imbibers have been enjoying a renaissance of historical beverages of late. Absinthe is back. Bartenders are rescuing cocktails like the Aviation and the Clover Club from near oblivion. Craft brewers are reaching even further back, with beers like Dogfish Head's stellar Midas Touch, whose recipe derives from molecular analysis of the residues lining a 2,700-year-old vessel found in a burial mound in central Turkey.

ROOT is similarly backward-looking, but with a counterfactual twist. Grasse, who has already scored in the spirits market with Hendrick's gin and Sailor Jerry spiced rum, wanted to create something new. He started by delving into a part of American history you might think would be the last place a distiller would seek inspiration: the temperance movement.

"I was particularly interested in how that history tied back to Pennsylvania, which is where my ancestors are from," Grasse says. "So I looked into herbal elixirs and potions and remedies, and discovered that root beer actually had a whole history prior to becoming root beer."

What Grasse pieced together was the story of root tea, which early Americans concocted from birch bark, sassafras root, allspice and all manner of botanical ingredients. As with most folk drinks, recipes varied from one place to another. Some sources suggest that root tea could be mildly alcoholic — perhaps 2 percent or 3 percent by volume.

When Prohibition gained steam in the mid-1800s, a Philadelphia pharmacist named Charles Hires spotted an opportunity. Using root tea as a template, he formulated a mixture of some two dozen herbs, berries and roots that could be mixed with soda to produce a drink temperance advocates could get behind. With an eye to selling it to coal miners, in place of the rotgut then stoking the piety of their God-fearing wives, he named it root beer. It debuted at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial exhibition. By the time the 18th Amendment made the whole nation dry in 1919, root beer's negligibly boozy predecessors were all but forgotten.

HALF OFF DEPOT

Why live life at full price?

To come up with ROOT, Grasse rewound the clock 150 years and imagined another way root tea might have evolved. By sleuthing and speculation, he came up with a list of ingredients. He found a partner in Melkon Khosrovian, an artisanal distiller in California whose main line is infusing vodka with stuff like celery and peppercorns, or black truffles. The experimenting began.

"Some of the samples were too smoky, some were too sweet," Grasse recalls. "For one, we used a rye base. One was a whiskey base. But the one that worked best by far was the pure sugarcane base." In the end, they settled on a sugarcane spirit incorporating birch bark, smoked black tea, spearmint, wintergreen, orange and lemon peel, allspice, anise, cloves, cinnamon and cardamom.

The result is unlike anything in my liquor cabinet.

Straight up, it smells like birch and vanilla beans suffused with gentle wisps of pipe smoke. An ice cube releases some of the spices, dominated by the allspice. Its off-dry sweetness makes it appealing as a shot, but I found that mixing it brought out its best qualities. Bourbon highlighted its affinity for tobacco. With rum and lime juice — a recipe from Paul Dellavigne of Southwark, who adds a dash of simple almond syrup — the warming spices took center stage, reminding me of the nutmeg-laced rum punches of Barbados. Dropped into a Guinness, Root undergoes some kind of alchemy that outstrips my descriptive powers, but I was almost embarrassed by how much I liked it.

I haven't tried cooking with it yet, but I've got a hunch that it would be mean in a Jamaican jerk paste. Recently I made one with rum; ROOT would kick up the allspice element a notch or three.

If there's anything that nags me about the stuff, it's how seamlessly Grasse has woven the product together with its marketing pitch. It's certified organic. It's branded by Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (116 N. Third St., artintheage.com), an artist-centric merchandising operation named after a famous 1936 essay by Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin. It touches every totem in the egghead foodie pantheon. "The distiller's an artisan," Grasse says. "The mixologists are artisans. Even the back label was created by Michael Alan, who bakes the bread at the [Headhouse Square] farmers market, for Wild Flour Bakery."

But even if it's the brainchild of an advertising wunderkind, ROOT is still a gamble. It fits no category. It requires imagination for you to bring out its best. It's inspired by tradition, but unsuited to traditionalists. As Grasse puts it, "I feel like we're riffing off history, as opposed to creating a historical document."

Considering how tasty history has lately proved to be, that's an idea with some promise. ROOT makes a compelling case for the merits of liquid historical fiction.

(t_popp@citypaper.net)

CORRECTION: In the print edition of this article, the ROOT, rum and lime juice cocktail mentioned in the twelfth paragraph was inaccurately attributed to Nicholas Jarrett of APO. It originates with Paul Dellavigne of Southwark. City Paper apologizes for the error.