Brad Sutton

speaker

1,533 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 30 Jul

Brad Sutton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.

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It begins because people were solving a problem.

Pain, illness, and the delightful reality that water wasn't that great for you, right?

Could make you very sick.

So fast forward now to colonial America.

Now you're in a farmhouse, right?

And you're in a kitchen and the family is making something and the safest thing that you can drink is something you've boiled.

So they fermented a little and flavored a little and whatever land gave them was roots, barks and herbs.

And this family we're watching is making what they call a small beer.

So it's low in alcohol, lightly fizzy, and full of stuff like sassafras and sarsaparilla, birch, wintergreen, molasses, honey.

And it smells like spice, earth, smoke from the fireplace.

And again, they're not thinking craft soda here.

They're thinking, how do I keep everybody alive?

Well, the fermentation would purify, right?

And so it would make it safe to drink.

So these early small beers are the bridge between medicinal root tea and what we eventually call root beer.

So the colonists borrow and remix like plant knowledge that they got from indigenous peoples.

And then they slap their own names on the brew, one such being root tea.

Here's where we kind of start to slide from medicine to pleasure.

So once you've got something fizzy that doesn't kill you, you start asking questions.

Could this taste good?

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