For six years, I lived on the same Williamsburg block as the Manhattan Special Soda Bottling Company. Naturally, when I first moved to the area, I tried their signature drink, the Espresso Coffee Soda. It was exactly what I expected and I couldn’t stand the stuff. While this beverage is considered a holy sacrament, firmly engrained in the taste memories of generations of Brooklynites, carbonated coffee is the quintessential love-hate kind of thing. However, I did enjoy hearing the clinkity-clink of glass bottles on the snaking conveyor belt as they were filled with the tar-like drink.
Wandering down the marvelous beverage aisle at Eagle Provisions last weekend, I discovered that Manhattan Special offers more appealing drinks, including a sarsaparilla soda made from actual sarsaparilla root. It’s part of a line of “Olde Time Favorites” that includes Cherry Soda and Gassosa, a “European-style” lemon-lime soda. I tried their Sarsaparilla Soda and while nearly black in color, it was surprisingly light, refreshing and without much nuance - a far cry from its “roots” in herbal medicine.
What is sarsaparilla you ask? A sarsaparilla is a brambly little shrub with a bitter taste once widely used for medicinal purposes, until it was discovered that the type used in sodas didn’t have any health benefits at all. Not to be consumed in a single sitting, Manhattan Special’s 28-ounce glass bottle features the image of a levitating, overflowing mug of foaming soda encircled by sarsaparilla fronds which serve as laurel, lei and halo for the frothy potable. Healthy? Not at all. Holy and sublime? Well, I’d say it’s the best sarsaparilla soda I’ve ever tasted.
Note: If you’re like me, you mix up things like sarsaparilla, and say…sassafras. Sarsaparilla is native to Central America and used for its root, sometimes for “root” beer. Sassafras is a tree in the Eastern U.S whose bark contains an oil once prized by Native Americans, and later by European colonists who made it into tea. Curiously, there are indications that sassafras extract may have been used in illicit sarsaparilla drinks during Prohibition, further contributing to my confusion.
If you haven’t heard me rattle on enough about sassafras…I mean… sarsaparilla, check out my recipe at The Kitchen for a hypercomplex tribute to the classic root beer float.
Originally published on Until Monday: Brooklyn
