Antique 1930s Hires R - J Root Beer Label 🥤 RIP 2023 American Icon!

Whatever Happened to Hires R-J Root Beer? 🥤 Antique 1930s Label, Unused

Size: 11" x 3 1/2"

Unused, never put on a bottle.

🥤 Hires R-J Root Beer Bottle Label, With Real Root Juices

This 1930s Hires R-J Root Beer label is a real beauty. It's printed on a shiny metallic gold-copper ground, with a big black circle behind the chunky white Hires lettering, a red R-J badge, ROOT BEER in white and a red banner reading WITH REAL ROOT JUICES, and the whole list of roots and herbs printed along the bottom. The gold catches the light in a way my pictures just can't show.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

• NET. CONT. 12 FLU. OZ.
• REG. U.S. PAT. OFF.
• Hires R-J ROOT BEER, WITH REAL ROOT JUICES
• CARBONATED WATER, SUGAR, CARAMEL, PLANT EXTRACTIVES OF BIRCH, SASSAFRAS, LICORICE, VANILLA, SPIKENARD, SARSAPARILLA, HOPS, WINTERGREEN, PIPSISSEWA, GINGER & FLAVOR
• NAME AND ADDRESS OF BOTTLER ON CROWN

That last line means the bottler's name went on the bottle cap, so the same label could go to any Hires bottler in the country. The back is plain paper.

🌿 The R-J Years

Hires started using the R-J mark, for Root Juices, in 1932, and by the 1940s a stylized checkmark had replaced it, so a label with R-J and WITH REAL ROOT JUICES comes from roughly 1932 to about 1940.

🥤 Charles Hires and His Root Beer

Hires Root Beer was the creation of Charles Elmer Hires, a Philadelphia pharmacist. The story goes that he first tasted root beer on his honeymoon in 1875, and by 1876 he had his own recipe and was selling 25-cent packets of powder that each made a gallon. At Philadelphia's Centennial Exposition that year he won new customers by giving away free glasses of it, and he marketed it as a concentrate of 16 wild roots and berries. He promoted it as The Temperance Drink and the Greatest Health-Giving Beverage in the World. In 1884 he began making a liquid extract and a syrup for soda fountains, was soon shipping root beer in kegs, and built a special fountain dispenser called the Hires Automatic Munimaker, and in 1890 the Charles E. Hires Company incorporated and began selling Hires in small bottles.

Hires ran for well over a century as one of the oldest soft drinks in America, but as of 2023 Keurig Dr Pepper's web page no longer lists Hires among its brands. Rest in peace, old friend.

🏡 Display

It's a great piece for a soda fountain wall, a root beer lover or anybody who grew up on Hires, and that metallic gold really glows in a frame.