August 6th is National Root Beer Float Day.
Some root beer history: 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 has been sold in confectionery stores since the 1840s, and written recipes for root beer have been documented since the 1860s
Philadelphia 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.
He changed the name and introduced Hires’ Root Beer in 1876 at the U.S. Centennial Convention in Philadelphia, according to company history. Initially, Hires sold a powder that consumers could mix at home with water, sugar and yeast, but the company began selling the drink in bottles in 1893.
He introduced Hires Root Beer at the 1876 U.S. Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.
To build Hires’ awareness, Hires became the first U.S. businessman to aggressively advertise his product, subscribing to the principle that “doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark: you know what you are doing, but nobody else does.”
That’s about the time that Frank Wisner, the owner of the Cripple Creek (Colo.) Cow Mountain Gold Mining Company and a local tavern, looked up at snow-capped Cow Mountain and thought about ice cream.
The full moon that night shined on the snow-capped Cow Mountain and reminded him of a scoop of vanilla ice cream. He hurried back to his bar and scooped a spoonful of ice cream into the children’s favorite flavor of soda, Myers Avenue Red Root Beer. After trying, he liked it and served it the very next day. It was an immediate hit.
Wisner named the new creation, “Black Cow Mountain” but the local children shortened the name to “Black Cow”. Since its inception, hundreds of thousands of root beer floats have been enjoyed around the country each day. So gather up some root beer and ice cream and mix up the perfect root beer float, no mountains required.