Eventually, pharmacies started adding different herbs and chemicals to improve the flavor: ginger, birch bark, dandelion, sarsaparilla, fruit extracts, and all sorts of other things.
But other species, like maples and birches and larches, combine a less extreme level of sugar in their leaves with the practice of going leafless during the winter to avoid foliar frostbite.
Deciduous trees like birch and aspen live for about 100 years, so the team couldn't simply wait for one or two centuries to find out what happens in the forest.
[Ben] Again, another ingredient that we're hugely familiar with the concept of a sap from a tree, whether it's birch or maple, but I'd never heard of this.