The Agony and the Extracts: Double Trouble? Front End
Lifter? Jamaican root-drinks pack a punch.
By Lise Funderburg
Brooklyn Bridge
March 1996
You've just ordered a roti from one of central Brooklyn's ubiquitous Caribbean
restaurants and slathered it with hot pepper sauce. Now, how do you put out the
fire? Inside the beverage cooler and next to the ginger beer sit a variety of
colorfully labeled drinks that seem to be intended for just such a moment. Some
are the hue of Worcestershire sauce, others a sludgy beige. All claim to be "real
Jamaican" or "Jamaican-style" and are made and bottled right
here in Brooklyn. But what are they?
If, like me, you didn't grow up with these unusual root drinks, finding
out requires investigation. Having conducted a profoundly unscientific survey,
including a long walk around the borough and a taste test performed by whichever
friends I could round up, I can now provide some answers.
First, the drinks' purpose: according to the Groundation Roots Beverage
label, the desired effect is metaphysical -- "Know Your Roots & You
will Find Yourself!" Mike Bearam, owner of Sprinkles restaurant on Myrtle
Avenue, says it's physical. "They're supposed to give you energy and
to clean the system out," Bearam says. Sprinkles carries two brands
-- Groundation Roots, which Bearam particularly likes, and Ital Roots, another
savory concoction.
Ronald Davidson, M.D., a self-described culinary anthropologist whose office
is in Crown Heights, affirms that these Brooklyn brews, based on folk recipes
from Rastafarians in the Jamaican mountains, are mildly effective.
Dr. Davidson partly attributes the efficacy of local brands to their fermentation,
which he says makes the herbs biologically active and thus different from
such health-food-store staples as herbal teas. But are root drinks intended
for medicinal purposes or merely as refreshments?
"It doesn't quench the thirst," says Keith Souden, manager of
A Royal Production, which has produced a root drink for seven years. "But
it does give you a lot of energy…For men it's also very good for stamina." Is
he talking about sex here? "Yes," he says. Does it really work? "Yes,
it does," he says with conviction. "Trust me, it does."
Dr. Davidson concurs -- sort of. "Yes, it is an aphrodisiac," he
says, but only in that it gives you pep. "If you want to expend that
energy in a sexual way, so be it. If you want to jump up and down, so be
it." But when reggae star Fabby Dolly endorses root drinks in "Peanut
Punch," it's pretty clear he's not talking about jumping: "Baby
Joe's got the motion, peanut punch got promotion."
Suddenly, new light is shed on the names of both the drinks and the bottlers.
Stamina Productions has a label adorned with two flexed, manly arms. Juices
Enterprises offers Double Trouble, and Front End Lifter and Magnum Explosion
Combination: A Thicker Flow Guaranteed. And then there's my personal favorite,
a peanut punch called Agony.
So what's in these bad boys? Based on information supplied by seven local
manufacturers, the clear brown tonics are typically brewed from about 16
herbs or roots, including such familiar plants as sassafras, hops and dandelion,
as well as those less commonly found in Brooklyn, like strong back, poor-man-friend
and nerve wisp. The thicker drinks are made with a base of Irish moss, a
dried sea plant which in its purest distillation resembles a clear gelatin
(or, as one of my panelists said, "Tastes like water; feels like clams").
A few roots also go into the thicker drinks, as do milk, peanuts, ginger,
molasses and bananas. "Tastes like a milk shake," said a second,
approving panelist. Other varieties seemed medicinal, some like hard cider
or West African palm wine, and some -- redolent with hops and molasses --
were considered by my testers to be overly bitter.
For whatever reason people have chosen to consume the drinks, they're doing
so in increasing numbers. Keith Souden says his company now sells up to eight
hundred cases per week, mostly to people here in New York but also to customers
as far away as Bermuda. Patrick Brown, head of Juices Enterprises, has outgrown
the two storefronts he rents on Buffalo Avenue and is scouting for a new
location. Business has multiplied since Brown turned to juice production
in 1987, after he found that working at Duane Reade wasn't exactly fulfilling
his immigrant dreams.
"I had come here for a better life, and it wasn't the kettle of fish
I'd thought," Brown says. He decided to make root drinks, which he'd
occasionally brewed in Jamaica. Here, his first target market was soccer
players. "I'd go with my Igloo and my ice to the football games at Buffalo
Park," he explains. This eventually led to bulk orders from local restaurants.
He made his early deliveries by bicycle, with his cooler perched on his shoulder.
Now deliveries are made by van.
Meanwhile, Brown is researching pasteurization -- all the root drinks included here are currently unpasteurized and thus have short shelf lives. "My main goal is to get into supermarkets," Brown says. Pasteurization would help and could introduce new audiences to that special energy which they can spend, as Dr. Davidson suggests, any way they like.