Sarsaparilla is a plant native to Central America whose name comes from the Spanish words 'zarza', meaning shrub, and 'parrilla', meaning little grape vine. Most people are only aware of sarsaparilla from old western movies. Sarsaparilla was fazed out because a key ingredient was sassafras root. The FDA banned the usage of the steamed root extract due to health concerns over the oil safrole, a byproduct of the dried root bark. Modern sarsaparillas use artificial flavoring. Sarsaparillas, Birch Beer and Root Beer drinks are all quite similar in flavoring as they were variants on the drink Sarsaparilla.
As carbonation goes, I found that while tipping the bottle back produced the expected fizz it still felt quite flat in my mouth. The taste itself is what is to be expected from this family of drinks. It's sweet and has a mild root flavor. Sarsaparilla tastes like root beer to me and one thing I've always found difficult is trying to explain what root beer tastes like. I was confronted with this when traveling to England for the first time and my British friend and I were discussing differences in food and drink when I mentioned root beer. He asked me what it tastes like and I couldn't describe it as anything other than 'root beer'. Think about this sometime and see if you could try to describe the flavor of root beer to someone that's never tasted it. There aren't many congruent flavors out there to use as analogies.
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