In 1602, an English explorer sailed home with a valuable cargo of sassafras root — and Sir Walter Raleigh seized the entire shipment using a royal trade patent, years before he ever set foot in North America himself. That's the real story behind an ingredient that went on to define an entire American beverage category, until the FDA banned it outright in 1960 over links to liver tumors. Root beer never stopped tasting the way it does. The actual plant responsible just isn't in it anymore.

This episode traces sassafras from Indigenous medicine and Choctaw filé powder, through a Philadelphia pharmacist's marketing gamble that built Hires' root beer empire, to the modern legal patchwork that makes the same plant simultaneously a controlled DEA precursor chemical and something you're free to forage in your own backyard. Along the way: a real 1672 colonial beer recipe pulled straight from a primary source, and two working bars — one in Brooklyn, one in Aspen — still using the real thing behind the counter today.

Full show notes, research sources, and transcript at thealchemistsbar.com.

Distillate: The Hidden History of Cocktails, Spirits & Drink Culture is a production of The Alchemist's Bar, part of the Obscura Meridian family of projects. New episodes every Tuesday at 6:00 AM Central.

Full show notes, research sources, and transcript at thealchemistsbar.com.

Follow The Alchemist's Bar on Instagram @the_alchemists_bar. Subscribe to the Alchemist's Ledger — the monthly newsletter where the research that didn't fit in the episode lives — at thealchemistsbar.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1494, Columbus found a berry in Jamaica that looked enough like black pepper to fool him — and this time, the popular story is actually true. He named it wrong, the mistake stuck for five hundred years, and it's still baked into the Spanish word for allspice today. This episode traces what came after: how a spice nobody fought a war over quietly spread into kitchens on four continents, and how a Victorian fashion craze for allspice-wood walking canes nearly wiped out Jamaica's supply so badly that the government had to ban sapling exports to save it.

Also covered: the real chemistry behind allspice's three-spices-in-one flavor, peer-reviewed research on its anti-cancer properties in laboratory studies, and the strange life of Pimento Dram — a Caribbean liqueur that started as a folk remedy for cholera, got renamed to dodge a martini-olive mix-up, disappeared from the world for twenty-five years, and came back from a rediscovered recipe in 2008.

Full show notes, research sources, and transcript at thealchemistsbar.com.

Distillate: The Hidden History of Cocktails, Spirits & Drink Culture is a production of The Alchemist's Bar, part of the Obscura Meridian family of projects. New episodes every Tuesday at 6:00 AM Central.

Full show notes, research sources, and transcript at thealchemistsbar.com.

Follow The Alchemist's Bar on Instagram @the_alchemists_bar. Subscribe to the Alchemist's Ledger — the monthly newsletter where the research that didn't fit in the episode lives — at thealchemistsbar.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Beer didn't always taste like this — for most of its history, it didn't have hops in it at all. This episode traces how a wild, untaxed weed toppled a centuries-old church-and-crown monopoly on beer flavoring, and debunks two of the most widely repeated legends in brewing history along the way: that Henry VIII banned hops as a "wicked weed," and that India Pale Ale was invented to survive the voyage to India. Neither is true.

Along the way: the real chemistry behind hops' preservative power, plus a folk sleep remedy that turns out to have genuine pharmacological backing. There's also 8-prenylnaringenin — the most potent plant estrogen ever identified, discovered because generations of hop-pickers absorbed enough through their skin to disrupt their own menstrual cycles — and the surprising, slightly embarrassing prehistory of craft beer's own founding myth.

Full show notes, research sources, and transcript at thealchemistsbar.com.

Distillate: The Hidden History of Cocktails, Spirits & Drink Culture is a production of The Alchemist's Bar, part of the Obscura Meridian family of projects. New episodes every Tuesday at 6:00 AM Central.

Full show notes, research sources, and transcript at thealchemistsbar.com.

Follow The Alchemist's Bar on Instagram @the_alchemists_bar. Subscribe to the Alchemist's Ledger — the monthly newsletter where the research that didn't fit in the episode lives — at thealchemistsbar.com.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.