Barq's (The one with bite!) is one of the most popular brands of root beer in Hawaii. It's also one of the few root beers that contains caffeine. True story: A few months ago I was called to the emergency room to see a one-year-old who appeared to be having severe abdominal pain. When she went for her x-ray, the mother said that the pain seemed to occur when she was lying flat on the table and not when they sat her up. I suspected that she might be having symptoms of gastroesophageal reflux (popularly known these days as GERD); but that's uncommon in babies more than a few months old. When I asked her mother if there had been any recent change in her own diet (she was still nursing), she recalled that the day before she had stopped into a 7-11 and had a large root beer. I happened to know that the only root beer sold in 7-11 is Barq's (The one with caffeine!), and that caffeine can trigger symptoms of reflux. Sure enough, the baby's crying episodes disappeared by that evening. The father said, "Do you mean we brought our baby to the emergency room for heartburn?" I told him that quite a few people come to the ER thinking they're having a heart attack, and turn out to have heartburn. (And vice versa, of course.) A few days later, the grateful parents brought a package to my office: a 6-pack of non-caffeinated root beer!

In Philadelphia, birch beer was not as common as root beer. It was red, while root beer was brown. I was always told that "authentic" birch beer was a Pennsylvania Dutch creation.

I still remember a cartoon from the Saturday Evening Post showing two boys behind what looked like a homemade lemonade stand, but the sign said "Beer, 5 cents." A man had just finished his glass and had a perplexed look on his face, and one boy was saying to him, "Sure, it's root. What other kind is there?"

Aloha,
Mark