Root Beer - An American Drink!

Recently I became aware that Root Beer is an American drink...

Wikipedia lists the description of Root Beer as follows:

Root beer is a sweet North American soft drink traditionally made using the sassafras tree Sassafras albidum (sassafras) or the vine Smilax ornata (sarsaparilla) as the primary flavor. Root beer may be alcoholic or non-alcoholic (but it is usually non-alcoholic), come naturally free of caffeine or have caffeine added, and be carbonated or non-carbonated. It usually has a thick, foamy head when poured. 

And:

Sassafras root beverages were made by indigenous peoples of the Americas for culinary and medicinal reasons before the arrival of Europeans in North America, and European culinary techniques have been applied to making traditional sassafras-based beverages similar to root beer since the 16th century. Root beer was sold in confectionery stores since the 1840s, and written recipes for root beer have been documented since the 1860s. It possibly was combined with soda as early as the 1850s, and root beer sold in stores was most often sold as a syrup rather than a ready-made beverage.^[4] The tradition of brewing root beer is thought to have evolved out of other small beer traditions that produced fermented drinks with very low alcohol content that were thought to be healthier to drink than possibly tainted local sources of drinking water, and enhanced by the medicinal and nutritional qualities of the ingredients used. Beyond its aromatic qualities, the medicinal benefits of sassafras were well known to both Native Americans and Europeans, and druggists began marketing root beer for its medicinal qualities.^[5] 

Since then:

Pharmacist Charles Elmer Hires was the first to successfully market a commercial brand of root beer. Hires developed his root tea made from sassafras in 1875, debuted a commercial version of root beer at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, and began selling his extract. Hires was a teetotaler who wanted to call the beverage "root tea". However, his desire to market the product to Pennsylvania coal miners caused him to call his product "root beer", instead.^[6][7] In 1886, Hires began to bottle a beverage made from his famous extract. By 1893, root beer was distributed widely across the United States. Non-alcoholic versions of root beer became commercially successful, especially during Prohibition.^[8][9] 

I have been a fan of Root Beer my entire life and nothing beats a solid Root Beer Float!!!!  My favorite Root Beer to date is called Bulldog and to me it's as close to perfection as you can get!

Another thing to be proud of as Americans!  MURICA!!!!!!

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