In 1876 at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the pharmacist Charles Elmer Hires introduced his commercially packaged root beer extract to a national audience, marketing it as a temperance-friendly alternative to alcoholic beer. Hires had developed the recipe from a traditional herbal tea made from sassafras roots and other botanicals, and his packaged version allowed consumers to brew carbonated root beer at home. The product's success at the Philadelphia exposition and subsequent national advertising campaign established root beer as one of America's first nationally marketed flavored soft drinks, predating Coca-Cola by a decade.

Hires Root Beer emerged during the Gilded Age when poets like Emily Dickinson were crafting precise, economical verse that often contrasted natural botanicals with artificial commercial products. The marketing of a wild plant extract as a standardized commercial beverage reflected broader tensions between nature and industry that appear in Dickinson's poetry and in the work of later American modernists who questioned whether mass-produced pleasures could offer genuine aesthetic or spiritual nourishment alongside their sensory appeal.