There is something quietly devastating about a drink that once outsold Coca-Cola vanishing into the margins of American memory. These are not mythical concoctions or fancy cocktail bar curiosities. They were everyday drinks, passed between neighbors, poured at harvest time, handed across drugstore counters. Real drinks. Real lives. Real history.
Most people alive today have never heard of half the beverages on this list. A few still technically exist, but in forms their originators would barely recognize. So let’s take a slow, honest sip through the past and see just how much flavor America has quietly forgotten to keep around. Let’s dive in.
1. Moxie – The Bitter Soda That Once Ruled America
Here is the one that started it all, and honestly the most jaw-dropping story in American beverage history. Augustin Thompson, a homeopathic physician, created the soft drink Moxie in Lowell in 1876, and it was initially billed as “Moxie Nerve Food.” Think about that for a moment. A drink literally designed to restore your nerves, sold by a doctor, and yet it somehow became a pop culture icon.
Moxie outsold Coca-Cola in the United States in the 1910s. Not matched it. Outsold it. In its best year of 1920, it outsold Coca-Cola. That single fact deserves a moment of silence, because today most Americans outside of New England have never even tasted it.
It is flavored with gentian root extract, an extremely bitter substance commonly used in herbal medicine. That bitterness is exactly why people either absolutely love it or push the glass away after one sip. On August 28, 2018, the Coca-Cola Company announced it would be buying Moxie with a promise to not tinker with its unique taste. So the old rival finally won, in a roundabout way. Still, Moxie endures.
2. Switchel – The Original Sports Drink Nobody Remembers
Long before Gatorade was a gleam in a sports scientist’s eye, American farmers had switchel. Before Americans had sports drinks, switchel was the beverage of choice for rehydration. Also known as haymaker’s punch, harvest drink, harvest beer, and swanky, this was a refreshing drink that was popular a few hundred years ago. Let’s be real, “haymaker’s punch” is a far better name than anything in today’s energy drink aisle.
Switchel is believed to have originated in the Caribbean, although New England also claims credit for its creation. It became a popular summer drink in the American Colonies in the late 17th century. By the 19th century, it was a traditional drink served to thirsty farmers during hay harvests, earning it the nickname “haymaker’s punch.”
In its most basic form, switchel is just a blend of apple cider vinegar, water, ginger, and a sweetener. Simple as that. In the 18th century, drinking vinegars, shrubs, and switchels was the absolute rage in colonial America. They were basically the first energy drink: sugar provides calories, water keeps people hydrated, and vinegar stimulates salivation which helps quench thirst and aids in digestion. That is genuinely impressive nutritional thinking for the 1700s.
3. Shrubs (Drinking Vinegars) – The Colonial Cocktail Mixer
If you have never heard of a shrub as a beverage, you are not alone, though they are making a quiet comeback in craft cocktail culture. A shrub is a drink composed of fruit, sugar, and vinegar diluted with water (this was its most common meaning in North America), or it can be a drink that includes these same ingredients but with the important addition of alcohol, usually rum or brandy.
During the Temperance movement of the 19th century, shrubs were an acceptable alternative to sinful spirits, and in fact, it became quite the fashion to find biblical and historical references for shrubs and drinking vinegars, which further legitimized the refreshing beverage. I find it fascinating that a drink had to justify itself with Scripture just to survive moral scrutiny. Different era, genuinely different rules.
Shrubs have been included in Slow Food Movement USA’s Ark Of Taste, a “living catalog of delicious and distinctive foods facing extinction.” The most traditional ingredients for shrubs and switchels – apple cider vinegar and molasses – are North American products, easily available to people who lived and worked on a small farmstead in the Northeast or on a large plantation in the South. The fact that they need an “ark” to preserve them speaks volumes about how far they have fallen from everyday tables.
4. Sassafras Root Beer – Before the FDA Changed Everything
Root beer has never quite gone away, but the root beer your great-grandparents drank was an entirely different animal. Root beer is a North American beverage traditionally made using the root bark of the sassafras tree or the sarsaparilla vine as the primary flavor. Modern, carbonated root beer was originally inspired by the non-carbonated medicinal root teas made by Indigenous North Americans.
Pharmacist Charles Elmer Hires was the first to successfully market a commercial brand of root beer. Hires developed his root tea made from sassafras in 1875, debuted a commercial version of root beer at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, and began selling his extract. The marketing story is almost funny – Hires was a teetotaler who wanted to call the beverage “root tea,” but his desire to market the product to Pennsylvania coal miners caused him to call his product “root beer” instead.
Safrole, the aromatic oil found in sassafras roots and bark that gave traditional root beer its distinctive flavor, was banned in commercially mass-produced foods and drugs by the FDA in 1960. Laboratory animals that were given oral doses of sassafras tea or sassafras oil that contained large doses of safrole developed permanent liver damage or various types of cancer. So the real original root beer, with its earthy bite and genuine sassafras soul, is essentially gone from store shelves forever. What we drink today is an imitation, however tasty.
5. Birch Beer – The Forgotten Cousin of Root Beer
Most Americans, if they have heard of birch beer at all, think it is just a regional oddity from Pennsylvania. It is actually far older and stranger than that. The earliest recipes for birch beer called for direct fermentation of the birch sap that was tapped from birch trees. This resulted in an alcoholic beverage that, according to accounts from the day, was capable of packing quite a punch.
During Prohibition, several Northeast breweries turned to producing an alcohol-free version of birch beer, which had largely faded into obscurity by that time. This marked the first renaissance for birch beer. There is something poignant about a drink that needed a national ban on alcohol to get its moment back in the spotlight. Although birch beer is most commonly associated with the Northeastern United States, variations of birch-flavored beverages can be found worldwide.
During World War II, large quantities of the country’s resources were redirected to the war effort, limiting birch beer production in turn. Following the end of World War II, birch beer experienced a resurgence in popularity in the United States, driven by nostalgia and the post-war economic boom. It’s hard to say for sure, but birch beer might be the most historically resilient drink on this list, rising and falling with every national crisis America has faced.
6. Cheerwine – The Southern Cherry Soda That Almost Stayed Local
Not every heritage drink is completely forgotten. Some are just hiding in plain sight, stubbornly regional in an era of global brands. Cheerwine is exactly that kind of drink. Cheerwine, from North Carolina, founded in 1917, is a cherry-flavored soda from Salisbury and is an example of a regional brand that built a loyal fan base through unique flavor and local identity.
The name alone is a piece of history. It sounds like something that should come in a clay jug with a cork stopper, served on a porch somewhere in the Appalachian foothills in 1923. The statement “it’s hard to believe there were so many regional soda companies in the United States in the 20th century” captures the essence of an era marked by a remarkable diversity in the American soft drink industry. Unlike today’s market, dominated by global giants, the 20th century was a golden age for regional and independent soda brands. Each corner of the country boasted its own unique carbonated creations, reflecting local tastes, traditions, and entrepreneurial spirit.
Cheerwine somehow survived that era of consolidation. Most drinks like it did not. Over a century old, still independently bottled, still with a flavor profile that is genuinely unlike any other soda on the planet. That is a minor miracle by modern beverage standards.
7. Vernors Ginger Ale – The Barrel-Aged Soda From Detroit
Here is something that genuinely surprises most people when they hear it: one of America’s oldest soft drinks was barrel-aged, like a whiskey. Vernors, from Detroit, Michigan, founded in 1866, is one of America’s oldest soft drinks. Its strong ginger flavor and barrel-aging process distinguished it from other ginger ales. A soda aged in oak barrels. Let that sink in.
Vernors occupies that same curious cultural territory as Moxie – deeply beloved in its home region, practically unknown everywhere else. The ginger bite in Vernors is sharp and assertive, completely unlike the mild fizz of modern commercial ginger ales. Think of it less as a soft drink and more as a tonic with serious attitude. It is one of those drinks where one sip either makes you a convert or sends you reaching for water.
The 20th century was a golden age for regional and independent soda brands, with each corner of the country boasting its own unique carbonated creations, reflecting local tastes, traditions, and entrepreneurial spirit. Vernors is one of the last survivors of that era, still produced today, though well outside the awareness of most Americans born after 1990.
8. NuGrape – The Grape Soda That Launched a Thousand Imitators
Most people have had a grape soda at some point in their lives, which means they have, unknowingly, experienced the legacy of a drink most of them have never heard of. NuGrape, from Georgia, founded in 1921, was one of the first fruit-flavored sodas, and it capitalized on America’s love for grape flavor, a trend still popular today. Every purple soda on a convenience store shelf owes something to this largely forgotten original.
What makes NuGrape genuinely fascinating is how its story connects to the larger arc of Moxie’s own history. Moxie was taken over in 1967 by new management and purchased the NuGrape Company of Atlanta, moved to Georgia in 1968. In Georgia the company known as Moxie-Monarch-NuGrape produced NuGrape, SunCrest, Kist, Nesbitt’s, and Grapette soft drinks nationwide, as well as Moxie. Two heritage drinks, tangled together in a corporate consolidation story that reads like a melancholy footnote in beverage history.
Vintage soft drinks are some of the most nostalgic pieces of cultural ephemera. These mundane everyday items seem to take on a certain mystique once they become unfamiliar relics of the past – there are even organizations dedicated to identifying and recording information about forgotten and discarded bottles. NuGrape, more than perhaps any other drink on this list, represents just how thoroughly the market can erase even the most beloved originals from collective memory.
The Word That a Drink Left Behind
Here is something I think is genuinely beautiful about this whole story. Most forgotten drinks just… disappear. No trace, no echo. Moxie did something extraordinary instead. The beverage name is the source of the word “moxie” in the American English vernacular, a noun meaning energy, determination, and spunk. The drink faded from most American pantries, but its spirit – literally its name – embedded itself into the language.
The word Moxie has entered the cultural lexicon as a word to describe people with courage, guts, nerve, and savvy. How many drinks can claim that? Not one other soda, not one heritage brew, managed to gift the English language a new word. Calvin Coolidge publicly called it his favorite drink and observed his 1923 inauguration in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, with a bottle purchased from a nearby general store.
Every single drink on this list tells us something real about the people who made and consumed it. Switchel tells us about the bone-tired honesty of farm labor. Shrubs tell us about resourcefulness and preservation. Sassafras root beer tells us about Indigenous knowledge and colonial borrowing. Moxie tells us about audacity. For more than 30 years the town of Lisbon, Maine, has held a 3-day Moxie Festival the second week in July, celebrating all things Moxie with a clambake, fireworks, a cooking contest, a parade, a book sale, a car show, a race, and more. That is not nostalgia. That is a living culture refusing to be forgotten.
What drink from your own family’s past have you never thought to look up? There might be a whole lost world hiding in that memory.
