Hey Candy Lovers,

Have we got a treat in store for you this week!

A real old-fashioned taste of America is coming to your favourite Cybercandy store, and online too. Over 200 brand spanking new varieties of American soda have landed in the Cybercandy kingdom and we can’t wait to have your feedback on these delicious little beauties.

In fact, we’re so excited by their arrival, that we thought we’d give you a little history lesson.

What? A history lesson? Oh yes! Every day’s a school day when you’re living the American dream…

Now an all-American classic, in the early-to-mid-1800’s root beer and similar soda’s such as birch beer and sarsaparilla used to be drunk medicinally and sold from old-fashioned drug stores across North America as root/plant extract flavoured mineral water. A bit like leeches (ewww!), these drinks were prescribed to cure ailments such as the common cold and headaches.

By this reasoning, you can’t drink too much root beer, birch beer or sarsaparilla soda as it’s made from plants, and is therefore good for you. Fact! We’ll back you up with scientific proof. You can’t argue with logic that’s over 200 years old!

Flavoured mineral water soon became so popular that sugar and carbonation (that’s bubbles to you and me) were added and the soda industry was born. In just a few years, thousands of bottles were sold on a daily basis and in the late 1800′s brands such as Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper and Pepsi Cola were invented.

Soda was a popular soft drink across America for most of the 1800’s and early 1900’s, especially during the prohibition days of Al Capone and the Untouchables, but of course it all really kicked off its dancing shoes in the 1940’s and 1950’s with the rise of the American diner (although the first ‘diner’ was invented some fifty years before… uhuh, it’s true!).