So You Want to Know About Hires Root Beer History
Hires Root Beer is the oldest major root beer brand in the United States, and the timeline gets a little tangled because the company changed hands enough times to make even historians groan. Charles Elmer Hires was a pharmacist in Philadelphia. He launched his first root beer formula in 1876, pitched it as a temperance alternative to alcohol at the Centennial Exposition. That's the basic textbook answer. The actual story has some rough edges. One thing people miss when they look into this casually: Hires didn't invent root beer, but he did pioneer the powdered instant formula that made it shippable and sellable nationally. Before him, root beer was mostly a homemade or local brew. His key move was creating a dry mix that you just added water to, complete with a signature bell-cup measure. That distribution model is what let it scale past regional bottlers. The original Hires company went through a lot. It was acquired by Brown & Company in the 1940s, then by General Foods in 1964, which later became part of Kraft Foods. In 1989, Pabst Brewing Company bought the brand from Kraft, and that's where things get murky for anyone trying to trace exact recipe changes. Pabst repositioned it as a heritage brand, dropped it for a while in the early 2000s, then brought it back as a premium product around 2008. They've been rotating between different packaging strategies and regional distribution deals ever since.
I remember trying to track down the exact formulation change that happened somewhere around 1972. There's a gap in the public record there because General Foods stopped publishing detailed ingredient histories after the 1970s and most of their internal docs were either destroyed or never digitized. What I ended up doing was pulling together packaging photos from eBay spanning 1965 to 1980 and comparing the ingredient lists printed on the labels. It took me about three weekends and roughly forty dollars in shipping, but it worked. The biggest shift I found was the transition from sassafras extract to artificial flavoring, which mirrors the FDA ban on natural sassafras as a food additive in the early 1960s. That regulatory change is the real turning point in the Hires Root Beer history, not any marketing decision. Another thing nobody tells you: the "original" recipe you can buy today under Pabst is not the same thing Charles Hires was selling in 1876. The company itself admits this. The 2008 revival used a reformulated blend based on what archives suggested the mid-century version tasted like, not the Victorian-era original. If you're writing a paper or just curious, don't trust the front label. Check the copyright dates on the bottles and the ingredient order. Ingredients are listed by weight, so if you see sugar jumping ahead of high fructose corn syrup between versions, that's a measurable reformulation you can cite. The brand exists now but it's treated like a legacy play rather than a growth driver. Pabst uses it mostly in craft beer-adjacent marketing and regional festivals. It's available nationwide in cans and bottles, but shelf presence is spotty outside the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. That's not a flaw in the product, it's just how legacy beverage brands survive. They don't compete on volume anymore. They compete on nostalgia and margin.
If you want primary sources, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission holds some Hires family papers, and the Philadelphia City Archives has advertising materials from the 1880s through the 1920s. Most of it is accessible by request, but the turnaround time is about six to eight weeks. For quick reference, the USDA historical food additive databases and the FDA enforcement reports from 1959-1961 will show you exactly when the sassafras conversation changed the industry.
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