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Bottoms up!
Kevin Guske

So heres a tribute toast with root beer in hand to you and the many mugs of suds along your happy trails. --Charles Wysocki, artist and root beer fan, 1928-2002

If you look at kguske's link above, you'll get enough of an idea of root beer to go on. It's really just a strong carbonated root tea.
Originally root beer was mostly sassafras root. Now it's mostly flavored with methyl salicylate (oil of wintergreen).

Root beers were bottled at home or on small local scales during the 1800s. In 1876, Charles Hires of Philadelphia (a pharmacist or "chemist") began selling packaged roots (then bottling liquid root beer extract in 1880) for people to use in home brewing. By 1893 he was selling bottled root beer.

Many other root beers date from the Prohibition Amendment to the American Constitution under which the sale and manufacture of alcoholic drinks was banned. For instance A&W root beer dates from 1919. Today both Hires and A&W are owned by the same company, Dr Pepper/Seven-Up Inc. which after 1995 became part of Cadbury Schweppes. That company now owns some of the oldest soft drink companies including Hires, Vernors, Dr Pepper and Canada Dry.

Parsa