Deep Dive: Sassafras

For eighty-four years, one plant defined the taste of an entire American beverage category. Then, almost overnight, it was gone from the recipe entirely, and hardly anyone noticed, because the taste it left behind turned out to be convincing enough on its own.

Long before that plant had a category to define, it already had a long life across the Eastern Woodlands. Indigenous people boiled sassafras root bark into tea for fevers and digestion, crushed the leaves into poultices for wounds, and used the twigs as crude toothbrushes. The Choctaw specifically dried and ground sassafras leaves into a fine powder, still used today under its French-derived name, filé, to thicken gumbo. That specific technique didn't stay confined to Choctaw kitchens either — Acadian settlers in Louisiana learned it directly from Choctaw neighbors and folded it permanently into what became Creole cooking, a borrowed technique so thoroughly absorbed into the regional cuisine that most people using it today have no idea where it actually came from.

Europe first heard about the plant's supposed powers in 1577, when an English translation of a Spanish physician's book reached London under the memorable title Joyfull Newes Out of the Newe Founde World. It praised sassafras as a treatment for fevers, the plague, and syphilis, and English readers took the claim seriously enough to build an entire export trade around it within a generation.

The popular version of what happened next credits Sir Walter Raleigh with personally bringing the first major shipment of sassafras back to England. The real story is stranger, and more revealing of how colonial trade actually worked. In 1602, an explorer named Bartholomew Gosnold sailed to New England and returned with a substantial cargo of sassafras root. Raleigh, who held a royal patent covering that stretch of coastline, seized the entire shipment, arguing that Gosnold had trespassed on territory the patent granted him exclusively. Raleigh didn't discover this valuable new commodity, and he wasn't the one who sailed for it, either. He simply held the right piece of paper, and used it to take someone else's discovery the moment it proved profitable enough to be worth taking. That's a very different, and honestly more interesting, story than the tidy version most people repeat, about a single heroic explorer bringing treasure home. It's definitely a story about how early colonial wealth actually got made, through legal leverage as much as through actual voyages.

By the nineteenth century, sassafras had settled into a very different role: the flavor hiding inside patent medicine. It was cheap, it was abundant, it grew wild across half the country for free, and it had a pleasant enough taste to mask whatever less pleasant ingredient a bottle actually needed to deliver, whether that was a bitter root extract, a heavy dose of alcohol, or something considerably less advisable. The clearest documented example is Hood's Sarsaparilla, one of the era's biggest-selling tonics, sold under an exotic tropical name despite the fact that its real flavor and medicinal engine was ordinary North American sassafras root bark. A healthy dose of alcohol did the actual work of making people feel better. The sassafras just made the bottle taste like something worth buying again, bottle after bottle, at a scale that made Hood's one of the largest patent medicine operations in the country.

Sassafras became permanently linked to root beer through a Philadelphia pharmacist named Charles Hires, who debuted his product at the 1876 Centennial Exposition. The popular story says his friend and advisor, Russell Conwell, talked him into renaming his original product, Hires' Root Tea, into Hires' Root Beer, specifically to appeal to hard-drinking Pennsylvania coal miners who'd never buy something labeled tea. That story is well documented, and not even the only version told in Hires' own era. Root tea recipes had already circulated in American cookbooks for decades before Hires bottled his first batch. He didn't invent the drink. He took an existing folk tradition, standardized it into a consistent, reliably flavored powder anyone could mix at home, and marketed it harder and smarter than anyone else in Philadelphia had managed. Consistency turned out to matter more than originality. A hundred different families brewing a hundred slightly different root teas never built a national brand, but one pharmacist selling the exact same sixteen-root formula in every packet did.

Hires built his fortune on sassafras root as the flavor anchor of his formula for eighty-four straight years, so what’s actually in that root, and why did the entire industry have to abandon it, seemingly overnight?

Sassafras albidum is a tree in the laurel family, and the compound responsible for its signature aroma is safrole, which makes up roughly eighty percent of the essential oil concentrated in the root bark specifically. That's the exact figure the FDA itself uses in its own regulatory text, defining sassafras oil almost entirely in terms of the one compound that would eventually get it banned.

On December 3rd, 1960, the FDA formally declared any food containing added safrole, oil of sassafras, or sassafras bark to be adulterated under federal law. The stated reasoning was straightforward: animal studies had linked safrole to liver tumors, and the agency judged that no level of a substance with that profile belonged in the food supply. This was a genuinely rare standard for the FDA to apply, since most food regulation works by capping an acceptable amount rather than eliminating an ingredient outright. The regulation didn't just restrict the isolated chemical. It named the bark itself, specifically citing sassafras tea as an example of exactly what the rule was meant to stop. The agency's logic was that safrole is so concentrated in the root that there was no practical way to consume the bark at all without also consuming a meaningful dose of the thing it was trying to eliminate.

Modern root beer replaced real sassafras oil with one of two workarounds: a safrole-free extract, produced by distilling the safrole fraction back out of the oil, or straightforward artificial flavoring built from wintergreen, vanilla, and licorice to approximate a taste most modern drinkers have never actually experienced in its original form. Either way, the flavor survived the ban, but the plant responsible for it didn't.

There's a second layer of regulation sitting on top of the food safety question, as well. Safrole is also classified by the DEA as a List I chemical, specifically because it functions as a precursor in the illicit manufacture of MDMA. That's a publicly documented regulatory fact, and it's the reason bulk purchases of real sassafras oil can draw law enforcement attention even today, decades after the original food ban ever had anything to do with liver tumors in laboratory rats. Two completely separate government agencies, for two completely separate reasons, arrived at the same conclusion about the same root.

One detail is also worth clearing up directly, because it causes real, ongoing confusion. Filé powder, the ground sassafras leaf used in gumbo, is a completely different product from the restricted root and bark. The leaves contain essentially no safrole at all, confirmed by both FDA and National Institutes of Health testing, which is exactly why filé has stayed fully legal and openly sold in grocery stores nationwide, the entire time the root itself was being treated as a controlled substance precursor.

That legal split between leaf and root isn't just a modern regulatory quirk. It traces back to the earliest English colonists, who already understood sassafras as two different things depending on which part of the plant they reached for.

Naturalist John Josselyn documented one of those uses directly, in his own words, in a book published in 1672. He described brewing "beer of molasses, water, bran, chips of sassafras root, and a little wormwood," specifically to treat colonists suffering from fever. That's not a secondhand legend, either. It's a primary source, in the author's own recorded words, describing exactly what he made and why he made it, three and a half centuries before anyone in Washington would decide the same root needed federal restriction.

You'll sometimes hear this same beer described under a specific name, "Licorice Ale," built from licorice root, aniseed, and fennel, but that version doesn't match what Josselyn actually wrote. The 1672 account is the trusted, verifiable source, written in the author’s own hand.

Today, that same plant sits inside a genuinely strange legal patchwork. Real sassafras root and oil are tightly restricted as commercial food ingredients and monitored as a drug precursor. Safrole-free extract is fully legal and widely used. And foraging your own wild sassafras root for personal use, on your own land, remains completely legal too, a loophole most people never think to ask about.

That patchwork hasn't stopped some bartenders from finding their way back to the real thing, wherever the law actually allows it. At the Moonlight Mile, a whiskey bar in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, the Kennessee Old Fashioned is built on high-rye bourbon, house-made sassafras syrup, and Angostura bitters. At Element 47, the bar inside Aspen's Little Nell hotel, the bar team built an à la minute root beer float using whiskey and a custom root beer syrup, designed, in their own words, to take drinkers straight back to childhood, glass in hand.

Sassafras carries one more piece of folklore worth a mention before this closes. Colonists genuinely built bed frames and floorboards out of sassafras wood, believing its strong scent would repel bedbugs, and the folklore grew from there into warding off nightmares and witches. Nobody ever tested the witch theory scientifically, and nobody particularly needed to — a strong, pleasant, pervasive scent is a perfectly good reason to want it in your bedroom regardless of what you believe it's actually keeping out.

Substitution turned out to be the only way this flavor actually survived. The taste that defined an entire American beverage category for eighty-four years had to be rebuilt from other ingredients almost overnight, in 1960, and it worked well enough that most people drinking root beer today have never once tasted the plant that gave the drink its name in the first place. Nobody demanded a refund. Nobody organized a boycott the way they had over Hires' alcohol content decades earlier. The forgery simply took over, quietly, and stayed.

An ingredient isn't just a flavor. Sometimes the flavor is the only part that survives, long after the actual plant responsible for it has been legislated out of the glass.

Pay attention to what's in the glass.

DISTILLATE is a production of The Alchemist's Bar — part of the Obscura Meridian family of projects. New episodes return this fall — follow now to catch Season 2.