CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: Before it was renamed the Hot Shoppe, it was an A&W restaurant. A&W is a well-known brand of root beer and a restaurant chain.

Roy Allen was the A and Frank Wright was the W in A&W. They helped create the idea of franchising. In the early nineteen twenties they began selling franchise licenses to local restaurant owners to use the A&W name and sell its products.

A&W also helped create the fast-food industry. By nineteen sixty there were over two thousand franchised A&W restaurants nationwide. They were bigger than McDonald's, but McDonald's soon became much bigger.

BARBARA KLEIN: Root beer is also part of the history of the Sonic chain of drive-in restaurants. The company began as a hamburger and root beer stand in Shawnee, Oklahoma, in nineteen fifty-three.

Today it has more than three thousand five hundred restaurants across the United States. Almost a thousand of them are in Texas. And, yes, Sonic still serves root beer.

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CHRISTOPHER CRUISE: There are hundreds of different brands of root beer -- and at least five English-language websites that review them. One is rootbeerbrothers.com. The five men who operate the site are not related, except by a love of root beer.

One of the Root Beer Brothers is Adam. We asked him his last name and he said "Root Beer." So, Adam Rootbeer, where do you find the root beers you review?

ADAM: "No matter where you go, you're going to find a root beer, and especially for us, wherever we go we look for root beer, and we're always amazed. I mean, just yesterday I unintentionally discovered another root beer that we had never heard of. And it's just so awesome because it's just like finding a treasure every time. Like, what's this one gonna be like, and what's the history behind this root beer? And so there it is, I mean, there's just this huge world of root beer."