The Pennsylvania Drink That Tastes Like Tree Bark, But In A Good Way

Pennsylvania's quintessential cuisine includes Philly-style water ice, gooey layered stromboli, saucy tomato pie, and some of the best pretzels in the U.S. However, there's another state staple that deserves to be just as well known and loved. Birch beer, a carbonated beverage with a spicy, earthy flavor, was first brewed at home by the Pennsylvania Dutch and Pennsylvanians in Appalachian country. Concocted from regional vegetation, the drink has an intense and unique wintergreen flavor.

In order to sip on the sweet and sappy drink, locals would boil the sap and bark of the black birch tree. Scientifically dubbed betula lenta, the black birch is also referred to as sweet birch, cherry birch, or spice birch. Early methods for brewing the beverage required yeast to ferment the mixture, giving the liquid a relatively low alcohol content. As the Prohibition of the 1920s pushed beer companies to redirect efforts to soda production, soft drinks and non-alcoholic birch beer grew in popularity in Pennsylvania.

Birch beer is reminiscent of root beer in both flavor and preparation method, but there are still plenty of differences between the two. Root beer was originally made from sassafras root oil, but the ingredient was banned by the FDA after studies found that safrole, a compound in sassafras, was carcinogenic. As developers sought to replace the taste from sassafras, the drink began to develop ingredient lists that varied significantly across root beer brands. Meanwhile, today's birch beer is still made using birch oil, a mixture distilled from fresh birch sap.

While root beer can deliver notes of vanilla, molasses, cinnamon, cloves, and ginger, birch beer tends to taste consistently minty from brand to brand. That's because America's sweet birch trees have the compound methyl salicylate in their bark, the chemical responsible for birch beer's signature wintergreen flavor. Birch beer is still produced by a number of companies in the Northeastern United States, including options from Appalachian Brewing Company, Pennsylvania Dutch Birch Beer, and Boylan Bottling.