Let’s go back to our roots, so to speak, and look at a traditional American ingredient that can add some comforting sweet-shop spice to your beer.
In the American context, sassafras refers to Sassafras albidum, a deciduous tree that grows in forests across much of the eastern United States. It has a long history of folk use—in homemade root beer, sassafras tea, and in the filé powder used to thicken Cajun gumbo. Long before that, people in Europe and Asia found medicinal and flavor uses for it.
Here’s the caveat: The Food and Drug Administration banned it from commercial food and drinks 60 years ago, after mice who were fed massive amounts of it developed cancer and liver damage. These days, commercial root beer successfully imitates the taste without using actual sassafras.