Birch beer?? Birch beer??
You never know what you might find out there.  In nature, I mean.  The Pennsylvania Dutch or Germans lived in conformity with nature.  A twig of birch bark tasted good when you chew on it while walking in the woods.  Why not make a soda pop out of it?  Everybody is familiar with root beer, but how many of you have heard of birch beer.  When I was one'a the Deitsch Kinder of Berks County, we drank more birch beer than root beer.  Pennsylvania Dutch Birch Beer is one of the oldest soda pop drinks in the country.  By the way, that the old style root beer had been made straight from the roots of the sassafras tree, and they had to stop making it that way in 1960 because the FDA connected it to cancer.   The C-word.  Well, maybe the Dutch knew what they were doing when they focused on birch beer.  Heck, birch bark contains some sort of stuff similar to aspirin.  Maybe that's why a lot of us thought a bottle of birch beer relieved our aches and pains.  Anyway, YES there is such a thing as birch beer, and it's good, and it makes me think of Berks County Pennsylvania.
Back to Berks