Why this drink from the 1880s is poised to become a lockdown hit
No one knows what Cronk tastes like, but internet sleuths are pushing for a revival
It’s heavy on the hops and spices. It may or may not have alcohol. No one is even sure what it tastes like — no one living, at least.
Welcome to the potential hit drink of the pandemic summer: Cronk.
The new contender for beverage of the season has been a hit before — round about the time of the second industrial revolution.
It’s named for Dr. Cronk, a doctorturned-brewer who seems to have hopped around the eastern U.S., leaving bottling facilities in his wake, back in the mid-19th century.
But now, the first batch probably produced in decades is underway, and it’ll be a few weeks of fermentation time before the first glass is raised.
For a few devoted followers, the Cronk revival is well underway.
It started late last month.
In the 1880s, Cronk franchises spread across Ontario. A recent tweet of an old newspaper ad has renewed interest CRONK continued on A9
That’s when Paul Fairie, a researcher at the medical school at the University of Calgary, tweeted a bunch of ads he had found while perusing old newspaper archives. Sprinkled throughout the news section from 1883 are brief exhortations:
Above a blurb about a man who caught 40 chickens: “Buy Cronk.” Below a note about men arrested for cutting hay: “Drink Cronk.” At one point, just the word: “Cronk.”
“Honestly, I think part of it is just the word,” Fairie said. “The first ad just says, Cronk, and I was like, ‘Of course, I’m gonna look into this.’ ”
Fairie is well known for “weird things in old newspapers,” as he puts it in his Twitter bio. A tweet from two years ago about a “salad” recipe that called for doughnuts and cream cheese got almost 9,000 likes. His yearly headline roundup is shared widely. But this is different. The original post has been liked thousands of times and shared widely; and internet sleuths weren’t content to just let Cronk go. Fairie had started a movement, and the internet was on the case. There is now a T-shirt and posters. Historical tidbits and pictures of dusty bottles bearing the Cronk name have been pouring in.
According to a newsletter from the Federation of Historical Bottle Collectors, Warren Cronk began in New York City, where he first created his “celebrated Root Beer” sometime around 1840, at the age of 25.
Within a couple of years, he’d tweaked his marketing, to “Genuine Compound Sarsaparilla Beer, for purifying the blood,” because at the time sarsaparilla — made from a vine with prickly stems — was believed to cure all sorts of things.
There is some historical debate about whether it was alcoholic, though it was sometimes advertised as a temperance drink. According to the federation newsletter, it soon became a “status symbol for the affluent public.”
In something like an old-timey fast-food franchise, Cronk began selling his recipe, along with the privilege of selling his drink in certain areas, and the drink’s popularity spread. There was even a manufacturing plant in Toronto. It was not smooth sailing. In 1848, someone identifying themselves as Dr. Cronk himself took out an ad in the Huron Reflector in Ohio, warning the public that there were people — looking at you, Horace Conner of Fairfield — falsely claiming to be selling his “healthful and pleasant beverage,” but that anyone authorized to be peddling the genuine article would have the papers to show for it.
(An H. Conner took out an ad in the same paper a month later to serve public notice that “We can and will make BEER, equal in quality to that of the celebrated Dr. Cronk’s.”)
The newsletter says that in the 1880s, Cronk franchises spread across Ontario. It’s not clear whether manufacturing had spread west, though the advertisements popped up in the Calgary paper at least twice.
It’s not clear why it was lost to time. In the 1960s, a retired Michigan man trying to build a vegetable cellar in his basement stumbled upon a huge cache of antique bottles, all light brown ceramic and labelled with the name “Dr. Cronk.”
They were rare enough that his story made the paper, and he eventually sold the bottles to an antique dealer for $4 a bushel.
“What Dr. Cronk’s sarsaparilla beer tasted like, no one knows,” the story notes.
Soon however, some may have the chance to find out.
By Tuesday, three days after Fairie’s original tweet, someone had unearthed a recipe.
In an online copy of the “Hand Book of Practical Receipts” is Dr. Cronk’s Sarsaparilla Beer, which calls for “sasafras,” sarsaparilla, hops and spices such as cinnamon, ginger and camomile.
Just looking at the recipe, Fairie says, he’s imagining something that’s a cross between root beer and kombucha. “It’s hard to guess,” he said. Fairie tweeted the news, and the mayor of Edmonton, Don Iveson, responded: “I am captivated and I am standing by to assist with Northern Alberta distribution.”
Then, on June 24, a major development: Cold Garden, a Calgary-based microbrewery, announced they were reviving the historic brew: “Stay tuned for Cronk,” they tweeted.
After that tweet, the reaction “exploded,” recalls co-owner and head brewer Blake Belding. “Everyone got very excited about it.”
When he’d first heard about Cronk, Belding said he just laughed.
“But then I read into it, and really delved into the Cronk hysteria that was building online. And I thought to myself, there was a time in my life I would have wished I had the power to bring Cronk to the world. And I realized, I do have the power,” he recalled.
“So I said, ‘ Of course we should do this.’ ”
Belding said the recipe is fairly simple, from a brewing perspective.
He falls on the side of Cronk being alcoholic, since the recipe calls for fermentation. Still, there is significant room for interpretation.
“For example, it asks for a pound of hops and that’s very unspecific,” he says. “I have nine different hop varieties that we use on the regular in our brewery.”
He’s thinking of tracking down a more classic hop variety to stay true to the recipe. He’s ordered all the ingredients and is waiting for them to come in, though that presented its own challenge.
“Sassafras is a precursor for narcotic manufacturing, and there’s an ingredient in it that is carcinogenic” he says, meaning cancer causing. He stresses that they’re tracking some down that won’t have that ingredient in it.
He figures it’ll take about two weeks to ferment. The question now is how much to make.
The initial plan was to make a couple of hundred litres for local consumption, but he said they’ve had people reach out from across Canada, so have scaled their estimates upwards.
For now, he says they’re going to list it on their website for sale across Alberta, but may consider wider distribution, depending on response.
Looking at the recipe, he says, Cronk is likely to be a major departure from the current summer drinks being lifted on crowed patios, like flavoured vodka sodas or seltzers.
“I do think it’s gonna be good. I mean, cinnamon, molasses, ginger, camomile, these are all tasty ingredients. I think it’ll probably taste slightly medicinal,” he said.
“Maybe kind of like a fall or Christmas beverage, but hey, anytime’s a good time for Cronk.”
But in some ways, it may be the perfect toast to a pandemic summer.
“It’s sort of silly and foolish, which is a thing that people like, especially right now at a very serious time,” he said, a sentiment that Fairie seconds.
“I honestly think some of the enthusiasm is just like, it’s a pandemic, and it’s quite boring,” he said. “This is like a little bit of fun.”