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

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  My name is Rachel Bruff 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.

• 0:19Cynthia 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.

• 0:31Speaker 02

  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.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:01Cynthia Graber?

  And listener Russell Taylor of Austin, Texas, wanted to know about black currant, which is a flavor that many people in the world love, unless you are American, in which case you've probably never tried it.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  I've seen it only occasionally in things like relatively fancy imported preserves here, but in Europe, it's 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?

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Russell and Rachel, your wishes are our command. Stay tuned and all will be revealed. This episode was supported in part by the Alfred Peace Lohn Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

• 1:52Speaker 04

  Support for the show comes from Google Gemini. You know that moment when curiosity strikes? You're exploring a new city with the family and a sculpture catches your daughter's eye. What is that? Who made it? With Gemini, you can snap a picture and get a fully interactive breakdown of its history, architecture, and even hidden secrets. Gemini is built for moments like that. Whether you're learning something new, solving a problem, or looking for your next favorite thing, Google Gemini is here to help. Download Gemini, Google's AI app, or visit gemini.google.com to learn more.

• 2:30Speaker 05

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• 3:01Cynthia Graber?

  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 naught. The fact that no one understood I meant two weeks when I said a fortnight. And of course, the purple candy.

• 3:26Cynthia 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 black currant. Black currant, not grape.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  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 black currant. Whereas your Starburst, you don't even have a purple. You just have that dark red cherry one.

• 3:54Cynthia 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 black currant. Two countries separated by a common language and a purple fruit.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  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.

• 4:14Speaker 06

  I saw one researcher give the ballpark estimate of 0.1%, like, might have tasted a currant.

• 4:21Cynthia Graber?

  Lilly Hisslop is a tree crop breeder at the Savannah Institute, which is in Wisconsin. She works on breeding black currants.

• 4:27Speaker 06

  Now, there's always the little bit of confusion that I get with Xanty currants, because people are like, oh yeah, I have had them in scones and stuff. And Xanty currants are not the same. Thing is black currants.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Zantic currants are literally just raisins, but they're a particular kind of raisin.

• 4:44Speaker 06

  They are raisin made from Corinth grapes, which is a black, small grape that is grown in the Corinth region of Greece.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  At some point in the past, to English ears, Corinth sounded like current. So the little dried raisins from Greece became known as currants. And then, when actual Ribeys fruits, like black currants, 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. So what is a black currant if it's not a dried grape from the Corinth region of Greece?

• 5:19Speaker 06

  They are a black berry that's a very deep color that has almost like a galaxy-like quality because 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 a resinous quality. And they're pretty tart, but they're very unique.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Black currants are just one currant in an extended family of fruity delights. They're all part of a plant family called Ribeys.

• 5:49Speaker 06

  There's also white currants and red currants, which are part of the same species. It's just a matter of pigmentation.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Well, not just pigmentation. They do also taste different.

• 5:58Speaker 06

  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 mouthwatering quality of it. Oh, I love red currants so much.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  White currants are a little sweeter and less tart than red ones. There's also pink currants for people who can't decide between red and white. And then there's the currant's oversized relative, the gooseberry, which looks like a hairy grape and tastes tart and fruity and amazing in both pie and chutney form.

• 6:29Speaker 06

  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.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Historically, currants of all varieties have been farmed all over the world, wherever they've been found, but Europeans have been particularly enamored of them. Black currants seem to have been cultivated intentionally in Russia.

• 6:49Cynthia Graber?

  As early as the 900s, and then they seem to have been popular around most of northern Europe by about the 1500s.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  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 black currant jam for me every year when I was little.

• 7:09Speaker 06

  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.

• 7:21Cynthia Graber?

  European settlers brought a lot of their favorite crops with them to North America, including black currants and in fact, currants of all varieties. Currants seemed to have shown up in about the 1600s.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  And by the late 1800s, red currants, black currants and gooseberries, they were being grown all over the Northeast and Upper Midwest.

• 7:37Speaker 06

  If we're lumping currants together with black currants 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. 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.

• 8:09Cynthia 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.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  But wait a minute, the ban? What is this 1911 ban that Greg and Lily are talking about? Books? Alcohol? Those are being banned, sure, but fruit?

• 8:25Cynthia Graber?

  To understand where the black currant ban came from, we have to talk trees, white pine trees in particular, which I promise is going to make sense in a minute.

• 8:33Speaker 06

  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.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  These humongous white pine trees were extremely useful for the early

• 8:59Speaker 06

  You simply cut down a white pine. It's soft wood, 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 because it had pitch.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  The white pine was so important that one of the first coins issued in the colonies was the white pine shilling.

• 9:18Speaker 06

  You know, these were really big deals.

• 9:20Cynthia 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% of the trees in Vermont and nearly as many in New York State. We really went to town on them.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:52Speaker 06

  And so 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.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  At the time, Europeans had a flourishing baby tree growing business. They could grow baby trees more cheaply than Americans.

• 10:12Speaker 06

  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.

• 10:24Cynthia 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.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  So this fungus needs both pines and rybys to complete its life cycle. It spends some time on the white pines, making spores, but then go to the black currents and then making spores there that go back and forth. So you need both of them. 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. It's like a little inconvenient for a black current. 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 90.

• 11:09Speaker 07

  95% of stands just eradicated by this fungus.

• 11:13Cynthia 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, black currents are particularly susceptible to white pine blister rust. So when the two met, the American pine was kind of screwed.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  And remember, America had begun importing and planting out millions of baby white pine seedlings from Europe where the infection was raging. Big whoops.

• 11:39Speaker 07

  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 gonna be really bad.

• 11:50Cynthia 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 those plants brought diseases and pests with them.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:16Cynthia 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.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  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 States was against white pine blister rust. White pine seedlings couldn't be imported until they were shown to be free of disease.

• 12:43Cynthia Graber?

  The problem is that white pine blister rust doesn't show up till 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 black currents.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  And when that still wasn't enough, they decided to eradicate currents from the US landscape altogether.

• 13:03Speaker 07

  Congress gave a bunch of money to the USDA. And there were 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 black currants and native currants and ripping those out with fire and herbicide.

• 13:33Cynthia 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. The government didn't much care. They were on an anti-ribes crusade.

• 13:44Speaker 07

  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.

• 14:04Cynthia Graber?

  Which meant no more delicious black currants, or of course, red currants or gooseberries for the American people. You guys just gave up on currants to try to save the white pine.

• 14:13Speaker 07

  Maybe people didn't love black currants enough. Maybe we didn't have a large enough culture for it.

• 14:18Cynthia Graber?

  But in Europe, they loved black currants 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.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Canadians were also faced with the currant versus white pine dilemma, and they chose both.

• 14:35Speaker 07

  While the US was really heavily investing in eradicating the currants, Canada took the opposite approach and went, oh, 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.

• 14:51Cynthia Graber?

  OK, so that's why we lost black currants 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.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  But it turns out that black currants have much more vitamin C than oranges, pound for pound. And black currants grow really well in England. They don't mind shade and cold.

• 15:18Speaker 06

  Now, there wasn't a lot of producers of currant juice 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 ribies, of course. And that's really what put currant juice and currants on the map.

• 15:50Speaker 06

  Ribena, as you know, growing up in the UK, ribena is a big deal. I mean, everybody, everybody drank ribena. Everybody knows where ribena is.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  Greg is correct. Ribena is everywhere in the UK. It's available in cartons and bottles and as a cordial to mix with water. It's in every newsagent's and vending machine and supermarket. And it's not alone. There are all sorts of black currant flavored drinks.

• 16:15Cynthia 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.

• 16:27Speaker 07

  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 black currant flavored.

• 16:54Cynthia Graber?

  And Lily's a fan.

• 16:55Speaker 07

  It's a better flavoring than grape is. It's a great one. It's so much more interesting.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Bold words. I, of course, agree that the British black currant version of purple candy is best, but I will acknowledge some bias.

• 17:09Cynthia Graber?

  There's only one way to find out. Candy Taste Test. That's coming up after the break.

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• 18:16Speaker 02

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• 18:47Speaker 02

  All right, are we ready for today's Black Current Taste Test?

• 18:50Speaker 03

  We are absolutely ready.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  I mean, it's not actually a Black Current Taste Test. It's a Purple Taste Test.

• 18:57Speaker 03

  OK, we're tasting the color purple.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  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, Jeff and Tim, to make this scientific.

• 19:15Cynthia 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 it with the Starburst.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  Skittles first, all right. The Americans in the movie theater-like box.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  And the British in the little plastic bag.

• 19:40Cynthia Graber?

  OK, I'm going to close my eyes, eyes closed. OK, here we go.

• 19:46Cynthia Graber?

  Totally black currant, 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 black currant.

• 19:57Cynthia Graber?

  Yep. This one is totally the grape.

• 20:01Cynthia Graber?

  I mean, does it taste like grape? It tastes like grape flavor. Whereas the black currant just has a little more richness to it. This is just sort of that sweet grapey thing going on, like the Manischka, it's grape flavor. Conquered grape. Whereas the black currant has like more depth and complexity, even in Skittle form. And drum roll, 100% correct on my first try. Over to you, Nikki.

• 20:25Speaker 05

  Okay, I've moved them back and forth, so now you don't know which one is which. And now I'm gonna open them up.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  It's very sweet.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Okay. I'm not gonna say anything until I've tried the other one.

• 20:44Speaker 05

  Okay, then pull them out and dun, dun, dun, dun, candy too.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  All right, here we go.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Mmm. It's easy.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  The first one is American, the second one is black currant.

• 21:00Speaker 05

  Congratulations, you did it.

• 21:02Cynthia Graber?

  The Starburst wasn't a fair comparison because the equivalent in the American package is red, it's cherry. But in any case, Nikki and I both aced it. We knew which one was supposed to be black currant. Frankly, the Starburst black currant was not as delicious a representation of black currantness as the Skittle. I went back and tried the black currant British Skittle, just to be sure. And then had another American purple Skittle, just for reference.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Mmm. Oh, the American one is, I feel, I feel sad for the children of America.

• 21:33Cynthia Graber?

  It's true, Americans are missing out. Black currant is a truly fantastic flavor, even in candy form. But as we said, most Americans have never tried it.

• 21:41Speaker 07

  I did not grow up eating black currants. I hadn't really heard of them before I got this job.

• 21:45Cynthia Graber?

  Greg hadn't either, he'd never tried them, but then he found himself in Europe.

• 21:49Speaker 06

  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.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  Greg fell in love with all the foods he was eating in Europe, all the fresh produce, all the delicious flavors.

• 22:07Speaker 06

  And after a short while, having this free time 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.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  So he did. And behind the restaurant he ran in a little town in Bavaria, Germany, there were some black currant bushes, which is how Greg became acquainted with the black currant. Acquainted and very quickly obsessed.

• 22:38Speaker 06

  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.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  Because black currants are really not all that sweet right off the bush. They're quite tart.

• 23:07Speaker 06

  And I love that. I just love the flexibility of these little, little black gorgeous things.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Greg came back to America. He left both the military and the culinary world and he got into horticulture.

• 23:18Speaker 06

  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, that tenure, I discovered that black currants were illegal in the United States.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  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 RIBE's quarantine and eradication effort had run out of steam. Because it turns out that all that huge effort to eradicate black currants hadn't actually succeeded.

• 23:51Cynthia Graber?

  In eradicating the disease.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 24:03Speaker 07

  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 black currants have the ability to not get it. So I guess we'll get rid of the ban. And then they just kind of did it quietly.

• 24:21Speaker 06

  And so the federal government, as it often does, kicked the restrictions and the law to state's jurisdiction. So they said to every state, you decide for yourself whether you want to grow these or not.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  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 black currants were still totally forbidden.

• 24:46Cynthia 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.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  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 casisse, which is blackcurrant liqueur.

• 25:09Speaker 06

  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, it's a 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.

• 25:25Cynthia 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 black currants.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  So the ban maybe wasn't so important anymore, but the law was still on the books.

• 25:43Speaker 06

  How do you change a law? I have no idea. I'm not a lawyer. But I went up to Albany, to the state capitol, 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 black currants? 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? Makes no sense.

• 26:15Cynthia 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.

• 26:23Speaker 06

  And it was terrible. It talked about how bad currants tasted. They were tart. Americans were never going to love them. All this stuff.

• 26:32Cynthia Graber?

  This is 100% fake news because the black currant tastes delicious. But you know what they say? There's no such thing as bad publicity.

• 26:41Speaker 06

  And the following morning, I got a call from a state senator way out in Western New York, who was on the agricultural committee. And it 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 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.

• 27:13Cynthia Graber?

  Greg became a black currant and also a red currant farmer. He has thousands of plants. He sells some of them to local farms so they can grow black currants, too. He also has a whole bunch of currant products from frozen fruit to juices to jams and chocolate covered black currants. Everything your heart desires.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  Lily says for a small scale grower like Greg, black currants have a lot of potential.

• 27:32Speaker 07

  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.

• 27:50Cynthia 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.

• 27:57Speaker 07

  Black currants 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.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  For the Savannah Institute where Lily works, black currants 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.

• 28:35Speaker 07

  Agroforestry is the implementation of more trees on farms. That can look like diversified orchards or alley cropping or wind breaks. 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.

• 28:57Cynthia Graber?

  That all sounds awesome. Black currants 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've also been like small farms growing them here and there, mostly people who had also fallen in love with black currants, either in Europe or maybe in Canada where they're more common.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  But there really isn't a market for them. Americans are not clamoring for black currants, yet.

• 29:21Speaker 06

  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 black currants have twice the antioxidant of blueberries. They have four times the vitamin C of oranges, more potassium than bananas, calcium, iron, manganese, magnesium, and this little berry that Americans didn't know about, you know, it's really a powerhouse.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Americans do love their health benefits.

• 30:00Cynthia Graber?

  But Lily is focusing on the flavor aspect. She says most black currants are a little too tart to eat right off the bush and she's trying to change that for the American palate.

• 30:08Speaker 07

  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 black currants and get people to know more about it.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  This is the real challenge. For more than a century, Americans have lived without the black currant. Purple means grape here, but Lily thinks it can be done. She thinks the black currant could stage a comeback.

• 30:42Speaker 07

  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 black currants. Just people need to know about them, have the opportunity to try them, be curious, which they already are.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  You might be wondering, why bother? Sure, black currants are great, but there's lots of grapefruit around. You can find all sorts of delicious options at the farmer's market and in the grocery store.

• 31:15Speaker 07

  We, we don't need no, no more stinking berries. We've already invented all of them. It's fine.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, no. If you've listened 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.

• 31:35Speaker 07

  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 black currants are joy and sparkle. You don't need it to live. It is not a vital nutrient where if you don't eat a black currant 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.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  I'll raise a glass of Casse 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.

• 32:29Speaker 05

  Your credit card company is hoping you don't hear this. They're charging you 21% APR interest, making it hard to pay down your balance. A home equity loan from Rocket Mortgage could cut your interest rate by more than half, so you could wipe out your high-interest credit card debt with the equity you've built in your home without touching your current mortgage rate. See how much you could save at rocketmortgage.com. Rocket Mortgage LLC, licensed in 50 states. NMLS Consumer Access.org, number 3030. Call 8004-ROCKET for full program details. Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I don't know if you've heard, but Mint's premium wireless is $15 a month. But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores. That means no small talk. Crazy weather we're having.

• 33:14Speaker 05

  No, it's not.

• 33:15Cynthia Graber?

  It's just weather. It is an introvert's dream. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan. $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com. From the studio that brought you WandaVision. I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore.

• 33:36Cynthia Graber?

  The Vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy. That family wasn't real. You sure about that? I had a father called Vision. How is this possible?

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest. Nothing bonds a family together quite like Mortal Jeopardy. Now streaming, only on Disney+.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  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 16 to apprentice in a pharmacy in Philadelphia.

• 34:15Cynthia 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.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  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. And at that time, druggists were looking for drinks that they could... Prepare in their shops and sell over the counter.

• 34:51Cynthia Graber?

  Bill Double wrote a book called Charles E. Hires and the Drink That Wowed a Nation. Drugists at the time sold all sorts of concoctions, things that were medicinal and also beverages that claimed to be medicinal.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  He was just starting out and he was looking for a drink that he could merchandise.

• 35:09Cynthia Graber?

  Hires had just got married and his honeymoon ended up combining business with pleasure.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  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.

• 35:35Cynthia Graber?

  The drink that Hires enjoyed was something that his hostess had made from foraged tea berry 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. You dig up that root and snap it and you're, you're going to feel like you're smelling a root beer straight out of the ground. 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 resulting spicy warm beverage had a reputation as a cure-all.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  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 30 tons a year to the King of England as part of their charter.

• 36:22Cynthia 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 of incredibly low alcohol drinks that were made with foraged leaves and roots and berries and all sorts of flavors.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  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 1% 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 4% alcohol.

• 37:08Cynthia Graber?

  For small beers, you took all these 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.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  In any case, the young, newly-married pharmacist, Charles Hires, very much enjoyed his first taste of sassafras root small beer.

• 37:34Cynthia Graber?

  He thought it had real promise, and he cut the recipe for it, and he took it home with him, and he worked on it for almost a year, till he found a product that he thought he could put on the market. Hires never shared his exact recipe, but Bill says we do know he did include the farmer's wife's tea berry 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.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  The result was a drink with a taste that was described as woodsy and minty and a little medicinal.

• 38:09Cynthia Graber?

  Hires created a dried powder from all these ingredients, and starting in 1875, he packaged and sold his Hires Root Beer Extract. 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.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  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 teetotaller himself, and he claimed this was a teetotal drink.

• 38:43Cynthia 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. It would not be as cool if it was called root tea.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  It might not even exist anymore if if we went with that name. Coolness 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.

• 39:26Cynthia Graber?

  We have no idea how old that package actually is. It's 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.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  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 in the blender to re-liquidize it. It was a project. Now I have sort of grainy black sludge. It really does look like some kind of petrochemical waste product. It smells very intensely of root beer.

• 40:11Cynthia Graber?

  Nikki 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. 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.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  I did read the ancient instructions that came with the ancient package. It says, "Do not use more yeast than specified, otherwise the drink will be unpalatable." I sense it may be unpalatable whatever I do, but I gotta give it our best shot, so.

• 40:47Cynthia Graber?

  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.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  Oh damn, I was supposed to bloom that in water instead.

• 41:01Cynthia Graber?

  I also read the instructions and like Nikki, I attempted to follow them. The instruction said to bloom the yeast specifically in lukewarm water. So I asked my spouse, Tim, who's a baker, and he said to warm the water a little. I did that and then I bloomed the yeast. 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 in case anything explodes.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  All right, here we are. Successfully bottled and now I'm putting the caps on.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  Good luck.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  Brown liquid. I wish you well. We set our freshly made Hires root beer aside to ferment for a couple of days and return to the late 1800s.

• 41:49Cynthia 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.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  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.

• 42:24Cynthia Graber?

  What his root beer did have was one of the earliest advertising budgets.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  He was riding on a streetcar one day to work and he, a gentleman 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?" 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." 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.

• 43:04Cynthia Graber?

  But he looked at his sales and he saw it was working.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  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. 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. 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.

• 43:40Cynthia 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.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  I would say that root beer rivaled every soft drink for the first 20 or 30 years. 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.

• 44:19Cynthia 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.

• 44:26Speaker 02

  And in the end, Dr. Pepper Keurig Corporation purchased Hires Root Beer, and they phased it out. Reed remembers his last sip of the original Hires Root Beer with fondness. 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.

• 45:05Cynthia 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.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Root beer's not number one, but it's a mainstay. It is consistently a part of American life. But growing up in England, I never encountered it. And I've literally had a woman from the UK in the museum make a disgusted face.

• 45:34Cynthia Graber?

  When tasting root beer. And her and her husband said, ew, it's like we're at the dentist. In America, where we don't think it tastes like you're at the dentist, A and 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.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  I realized while I was making my own Heir's Root Beer Homebrewed that I had never actually tried a root beer. My only experience of the flavor was root beer flavored 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. Yeah, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, if you include this asperilla that I already had in my fridge. Yeah.

• 46:26Cynthia Graber?

  Wow, I have four.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  I did go a little nuts, but it's my first time.

• 46:31Cynthia Graber?

  We decided to start our root beer tasting session with the homebrew because, well, I was a little terrified that we were going to poison ourselves and I wanted to get it out of the way. I just hope it doesn't kill us.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  I don't, you know, I'm an optimist, but I fail to see how it could actually kill us. That said, it did look really pretty dubious. But listen, we will do almost anything to bring you this show.

• 46:53Cynthia Graber?

  We didn't know how carbonated it would have gotten after a couple of days of fermenting, so we carefully opened the tops.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  Ew!

• 46:59Cynthia Graber?

  It smells really revolting.

• 47:01Speaker 02

  Holy moly.

• 47:02Cynthia Graber?

  Oh, no.

• 47:02Speaker 02

  That's all I have to say about that. I don't think I've smelled anything so bad. It was like putting my nose in a sewer. Holy, holy.

• 47:08Cynthia Graber?

  It is gross.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  Wow, Cynthia, are we really gonna drink this? That smells so bad, it's intense. But we did. We each poured a delicate serving out over some ice, took a deep breath and tried it. Cheers, Cynthia, it's been real. Okay, I'm gonna take a tiny sip.

• 47:26Cynthia Graber?

  I just spit it back in the glass.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  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.

• 47:38Cynthia Graber?

  Bleh.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  I'm going back for a second sip.

• 47:40Cynthia Graber?

  Ew, definitely not. Tastes about as bad as it smells.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  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.

• 47:57Cynthia Graber?

  I'm guessing that I used too much yeast because half of the printed recipe meant using one-sixth 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.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  We thought it was only fair and reasonable to try the most popular root beer next, A and W.

• 48:20Cynthia Graber?

  Smells totally like root beer, just what I expected it to smell like.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  There is a whole lot more bubble going on.

• 48:29Cynthia Graber?

  That tastes like root beer. I don't really know how to explain it other than it tastes like root beer. It has that rooty, earthy bit. It's very sweet.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  This A and W I would never drink. It's, it's like syrup.

• 48:43Cynthia Graber?

  It is very, very sweet.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  And the wintergreen note is really a little much.

• 48:46Cynthia 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.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  Oh, nice. Balanced.

• 48:55Cynthia Graber?

  This one is like, I'm lovely with a bunch of things going on.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  This one for me is the closest to my hires in that it's just feels like a refreshing, slightly spicy herbal tincture.

• 49:09Cynthia Graber?

  Yeah.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  It's still a little too sweet, but.

• 49:11Cynthia Graber?

  This to me isn't spicy, it's spiced, but it definitely is like that.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  That's what I mean, like warm. 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.

• 49:34Cynthia 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. It tastes a lot like root beer.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  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. Which is not surprising because sarsaparilla and sarsapras 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.

• 50:14Cynthia Graber?

  If you're curious about what sarsapras and sarsaparilla have to do with both MDMA or ecstasy and the Smurfs, you'll want to get ahold of our upcoming newsletter for our special supporters at gastropod.com/support.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  Huge thanks to listeners Rachel and Russell for such fascinating questions and to our experts Lily Hisslop, 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 ahold of some black currency goodness yourself.

• 50:44Cynthia Graber?

  Thanks as always to our fabulous producer Claudia Guy. We'll be back in a couple of weeks. Till then.

• 50:51Cynthia Graber?

  Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities, so do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com/switch.

• 51:10Speaker 06

  Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. From the studio that brought you WandaVision. I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore.

• 51:29Speaker 06

  The Vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy. That family wasn't real. You sure about that? I had a father called Vision. How is this possible?

• 51:40Speaker 06

  Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest. Nothing bonds a family together quite like Mortal Jeopardy. Now streaming only on Disney+.