National Root Beer Float Day

In the United States August 6th is National Root Beer Float Day.

First of all, what is a root beer float? If you aren't American, you may never have heard of this or, even if you have, you might not know what it actually is.

A root beer float is a type of ice cream soda, a drink that is also known as a coke float, snowball and spider. These drinks have ice cream in a soft drink or a mixture made from flavoured syrup and carbonated water (which is all many soft drinks are themselves, really).

The root beer float is also known as a "black cow" or "brown cow" and the traditional recipe for it uses vanilla ice cream, although other flavours can also be used. The soft drink used is, naturally, root beer. Root beer is, in this case, a carbonated soft drink (there are alcoholic versions) that is made using the root (hence the name) of the sassafras plant or the bark of the tree, which is native to North America and Asia, although some use cola instead. The "cow" names tend to be from using different drinks as the base and different ice cream flavours.

National Ice Cream Soda Day

June 20th is National Ice Cream Soda Day in the United States.

Ice cream sodas, which are also known as spiders, snowballs, coke floats and ice cream floats, largely depending on the country, are a drink that, to no great surprise, contains ice cream and a soft drink, the latter being the soda part of the name, or, alternatively, carbonated water and a flavoured syrup.

Supposedly invented in the late 19th century in Philadelphia by Robert McCay Green, after he ran out of ice to cool his drinks and instead started adding ice cream to them.

Ice cream sodas come in many different varieties, some more well known than others, and they are apparently responsible for the creation of the ice cream sundae, after the drink was banned on religious days.