Every year on National Root Beer Float Day, Americans celebrate the frothy combination of root beer and vanilla ice cream — a summertime favorite whose story begins centuries before the first scoop ever hit the soda.
People have been making drinks similar to root beer by fermenting various herbs and roots with sugar since at least the 16th century, Ken Albala, professor of history at the University of the Pacific in California and creator of the "Forgotten Foods" lecture series, told Fox News Digital.
When European settlers arrived in the New World, they discovered plants considered to be very medicinal, including sassafras, which was prized as an antidote to syphilis and experienced a craze in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Albala said.
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Early colonial root beer was typically made by steeping sassafras root bark with other herbs and barks, adding sugar and allowing the mixture to ferment before bottling it, Albala said. It was called "beer" because it was slightly alcoholic — generally 2% or less.
A compound in sassafras oil — safrole — was deemed to be carcinogenic, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned it as a food additive in the 1960s, according to ScienceDirect. Modern root beer typically uses safrole-free sassafras extracts, along with wintergreen and other natural or artificial flavorings that replicate the original taste, according to Allrecipes.
The history of the root beer float is a little less clear.
One legend has it that Frank J. Wisner, a brewer in Cripple Creek, Colorado, was inspired to invent the beverage in 1893 while gazing out at Cow Mountain.
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"Its snow-covered peak above darkened slopes inspires him," Colorado Public Radio reported. "He drops a scoop of vanilla ice cream into a mug of root beer, inventing the root beer float or, as he called it, the Black Cow."
Rachel Storm, History Colorado's curator of business and industry, told the Denver Gazette, however, that the story is a myth.
"I started digging around, and I found there's actually no proof of this," she said.
Albala believes the modern version of the root beer float likely emerged at A&W, established in 1919 as a roadside root beer stand in Lodi, California, or somewhere similar.
The Lodi region gets "blazingly hot" in the summer, Albala said, theorizing that someone decided to add ice cream to A&W's root beer "to make it even colder."
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A&W was one of America's first franchised chain restaurants, Albala said.
The company's website says it is "the first American chain restaurant to reach the 100-year milestone." Its root beer is made fresh in each restaurant and takes about 45 minutes to prepare, according to the chain, and its root beer float has been "known around the world for over 100 years."
Root beer and other soda floats became a "very typical, mid-century way to serve ice cream," Albala said.
"It's a surprisingly great combination of flavors," he added. "The acidity of the soda and the rooty, herbal sassafras flavor is mellowed by the ice cream, which melts very slowly."
Root beer isn't a fashionable flavor anymore, according to Albala, as younger generations prefer fizzy-flavored waters, kombuchas and energy drinks, while sodas in general have fallen out of favor.
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A 2026 YouGov survey found that Barq's Root Beer is the 12th most popular beverage among millennials, with Sprite coming in first place. Among baby boomers, A&W Root Beer is the fourth most popular beverage.
International visitors are also not typically fans of root beer, Albala said, because wintergreen is one of the beverage's primary flavors.
"They say, 'This tastes like toothpaste!'" Albala said. "And the addition of ice cream would strike anyone but Americans as strange."
Root beer's relegation to a nostalgic soda and its fading popularity among younger consumers is a shame, Albala said.
"It's a very original American soda that goes back much further than the commercial brands that exist now, and the combination of ice cream is a unique and fascinatingly lovely thing," he said.
On National Root Beer Float Day, "participating A&W Restaurants serve free small root beer floats, requesting donations for veterans' groups," the company's website says.
