The can in your hand has almost nothing to do with what people drank three hundred years ago.
Same name. Same fizz. Entirely different origin.
What we call soda today is carbonated water forced full of gas. Manufacturers flavor it with artificial extracts and sweeten it with high fructose corn syrup. They engineer the flavor profile to keep you reaching for the next one. The goal is shelf stability and mass distribution. It is not nourishment.
Before commercial soda existed, people all over the world already drank fizzy, flavorful beverages. They made them from ginger, roots, fruit, herbs, and water [1]. The fizz was real. The cultures were alive. And the people drinking them knew what we are only beginning to recover. What they drank was doing something for them.
Fermented drinks were the original soda. Understanding that history changes what you see when you look at your kitchen right now.
The World Before Forced Carbonation
For most of human history, fizzy drinks were fermented drinks.
Carbonation was not something you added from a tank. It happened when wild yeasts and bacteria consumed sugar and released carbon dioxide. That process made the bubbles. Traditional ginger beer bubbles were alive. Commercial soda bubbles are not.
Before clean water systems existed, communities across Europe and colonial America faced a consistent problem. Drinking water from local sources was often contaminated. It was genuinely dangerous. So families brewed mildly fermented beverages from berries, bark, herbs, roots, and grain. Brief fermentation produced enough alcohol and acid to make the water safe [2].
These were not social indulgences. They were daily necessities. Families brewed them the way we buy groceries. Children drank them. Workers drank them in the fields. Colonists drank them because contaminated water could kill them.
In addition, 18th-century colonial Americans relied on shrubs and switchels. Makers fermented them from water, vinegar, sugar, and ginger. Workers drank them for hydration and digestion support during long days of physical labor [5]. They were the original sports drink. And they worked.
Ginger Beer: A Living Tradition
Brewers in England first produced ginger beer in the mid-18th century. They used a starter culture called the ginger beer plant to ferment ginger, sugar, and water. That culture produced natural carbonation and gave the beverage its characteristic fizz.
Ginger beer spread quickly. By the late 18th century, households across the United Kingdom and North America drank it regularly [1]. Families treated the ginger beer plant as a living member of the household. They passed it from home to home the way people share sourdough starters and kefir grains today. They fed it regularly. It was then used to produce batch after batch of naturally carbonated ginger beer.
Today, the ginger bug you make in your kitchen descends directly from that tradition. You capture wild yeast and lactic acid bacteria from fresh ginger. You feed it sugar and water. It produces natural carbonation, gentle tang, and a living probiotic base that ferments almost any sweetened liquid [3].
The difference is that for most of the 20th century, almost no one practiced this anymore. The factory made it seem unnecessary.
Root Beer and the Roots Beneath It
Root beer carries an even older history than ginger beer. That history begins not with European colonists but with the Indigenous peoples of North America.
Long before colonists arrived, native peoples brewed medicinal tonics from sassafras, sarsaparilla, wintergreen, and dandelion [4]. They used every part of the sassafras plant. They made tisanes and syrups to treat respiratory conditions and stomach problems. These were purposeful, plant-based beverages. They worked.
When European colonists arrived, they learned from these practices. They also brought their own small beer traditions with them. Together, those two influences produced the first root beers. Families brewed them from sassafras, sarsaparilla, molasses, and yeast. They used these drinks to cleanse the blood, settle the stomach, and promote vitality [4]. They passed recipes down through generations and often brewed a fresh batch each spring.
Beyond daily use, root beer served as a communal beverage. Communities brewed it for seasonal gatherings, harvest festivals, and barn raisings. Children and adults enjoyed it together. Its natural effervescence made it festive.
These fermented drinks were the original soda of this continent. They were communal. They were medicinal. Most importantly, they were alive.
When Commerce Replaced Culture
The shift from fermented drinks to commercial soda happened gradually across the 19th and early 20th centuries. Industrialization drove it. So did the rise of the pharmacist-entrepreneur.
Pharmacists in the 19th century sought to create cure-all concoctions. Medicinal root drinks gained a new commercial image as a result. Charles Hires commercialized root beer in the 1870s. Coca-Cola followed in 1886 as a pharmacist’s syrup sold at soda fountains [1]. The soda fountain became a cultural institution. It dispensed sweetened, flavored, carbonated water as a pleasure beverage rather than a fermented tonic.
Meanwhile, gas infusion technology improved. Manufacturers could now force carbonation from a tank instead of growing it through fermentation. Non-alcoholic ginger ale was born from that development. Unlike ginger beer, ginger ale gets its fizz from forced CO2 rather than a living culture [4].
Natural fermentation takes time. It requires attention. It produces a variable, living product. Forced carbonation is fast, consistent, and infinitely scalable. For an industry built on uniformity and shelf life, the choice was straightforward.
So factories crowded the old traditions out. They made home fermentation seem old-fashioned and unnecessary. A can cost less and required nothing of the buyer. The ginger beer plant and the homemade root beer tradition quietly disappeared from most households.
What Was Actually Lost
Commercial soda delivers carbonation, sweetness, and flavor. What it does not deliver is any of the microbial activity that made traditional fermented drinks genuinely beneficial.
Wild fermentation produces lactic acid bacteria and organic acids. It delivers a measurable population of beneficial microorganisms that reach the gut as living cultures [3]. Traditional fermented beverages also carry the nutritional contribution of the herbs and roots brewed into them. Fermentation enhances the bioavailability of those compounds.
In contrast, commercial soda replaces all of that. It substitutes forced CO2 for natural carbonation. Unfortunately, it uses high fructose corn syrup instead of fermented sugars. It also adds artificial flavors, phosphoric acid, and preservatives designed to prevent microbial activity. Tragically, it is not a continuation of the original tradition. It is a replacement of it, wearing the same name.
The modern gut health conversation is, in many ways, a long overdue recognition of what traditional fermented beverages already understood. The people brewing ginger beer in 18th-century Yorkshire did not have access to microbiome research. Still, they knew that what they drank made them feel well. They were right [3].
Coming Home
When you make a ginger bug and use it to ferment juice or brew root beer, you are not doing something trendy.
You are doing something ancient.
You are recovering a practice that sustained households for centuries before a factory made it seem unnecessary. A whole generation grew up thinking fizzy drinks came in cans and tasted like artificial cherry. That is not what a fizzy drink was.
The ginger bug represents something the commercial soda industry was never designed to offer. It is a living, intentionally made beverage. It connects you to your ingredients, your process, and a tradition that goes deep.
YHVH placed ginger in the earth with purpose. The roots and herbs in traditional root beer grew from soil He designed. The wild yeasts in a ginger bug starter belong to His created ecosystem. They do exactly what He designed them to do.
Returning to these traditions is not nostalgia. It is alignment.
Your kitchen is the right place for it.
Continue the Journey: Go Deeper Into Fermentation
If the history in this article stirred your curiosity and you are ready to start making your own fermented drinks, here is where to begin.
Start with the foundation: Fermentation for Beginners: A Complete Guide to Fermented Foods and Drinks covers everything you need to understand how fermentation works before you make your first batch.
Make your starter: Ginger Bug Starter walks you through the 4 to 7 day process of establishing an active ginger bug culture — the living foundation for everything else in this series.
Your first second ferment: Ginger Bug Juice Soda is the simplest and most adaptable second ferment you can make — 100% pure juice, a quarter cup of ginger bug liquid, and two days of patience.
A traditional classic: Ginger Bug Old-Fashioned Root Beer uses the same roots and herbs the colonists used — sarsaparilla, dandelion root, licorice, sassafras — brewed fresh and fermented with your ginger bug.
For the whole-being nourishment framework that holds all of this together, The Eden Way: Reclaiming Your Body, Mind, and Spirit Through the Creator’s Original Design is the place to start.
Explore the full fermentation recipe collection here: Ferments
And dive deeper into the fermentation education series here: Fermentations
New recipes and articles added regularly.
Healthy Living Picks
Browse the Healthy in Heart Amazon Storefront for pressure-rated swing-top fermentation bottles, fine-mesh strainers, organic ginger, and the roots and herbs used in traditional fermented drinks — everything you need to get started in one place.
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References
[1] Hires, C. E. (1876). Commercial root beer production history. Cited in: Meacham, S. (2005). Rum and the American Revolution. Yale University Press; also referenced in Wikipedia contributors, “Root beer.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_beer
[2] Hornsey, I. S. (2003). A History of Beer and Brewing. Royal Society of Chemistry. https://doi.org/10.1039/9781847550026
[3] Gaggia, F., Di Gioia, D., Baffoni, L., & Biavati, B. (2011). The role of protective and probiotic cultures in food and feed and their impact in food safety. Trends in Food Science and Technology, 22(S1), S58–S66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tifs.2011.03.003
[4] Flavorman. (2024). Drink origins: Root beer. https://www.flavorman.com/media/drink-origins-root-beer
[5] Royal Coffee. (2022). Shrubs and switchels: North American heritage. https://royalcoffee.com/shrubs-and-switchels/
