birch beer
1
6.3
- noun
- /bɜrʧ bɪr/
- US
:
cerveza de abedul
Examples
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Serve them a nice cold root or birch beer!
Blog text (25) -
Many people enjoy drinking birch beer on hot summer days.
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At the festival, I had a refreshing glass of birch beer with my meal.
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You can find birch beer in most specialty soda shops.
Synonyms
A fermented drink made with sugar and the sap of spruce trees
Surface Forms
Morphology
birch + beer
The meaning is directly compositional: 'birch' names the flavoring/ingredient and 'beer' names a beverage, so a learner can infer it is a drink made from or flavored with birch. This noun–noun modification pattern is common and cross-linguistically transparent, so a B1 learner who knows both words would reasonably deduce the MWE's meaning.
Etymology
Birch beer may come from old recipes where people used the bark or sap of the birch tree to make a flavored, sometimes lightly alcoholic drink. The word beer stayed because early versions were like weak beer, so today birch beer means a sweet, fizzy soft drink flavored with birch.