After checking Google and YouTube, I found that you CAN make tea from the leaves. The video that I watched was not all that great, and the lady said that it looked almost slimy, but tasted okay when she drank some. It was a light green colored tea, and didn’t look bad to me. I may experiment and see what I think about the leaf tea. Since the leaf is used to thicken soups, it makes sense to me that it might make a thicker tea also. However, most of the articles said that you can make a poultice from the leaves, and it helps with inflammation; so that Is something good to know.
This thread reminds me of the root beer my dad used to make. For some reason, root beer was big in Indiana. I have childhood memories of a place called Dog 'n Suds, which was a hot dog/root beer place. Anyway, I don't know if he used sassafras root or birch bark or some combination of the two. I do recall that it was good.
There was a Dog 'n Suds in Stephenson, Michigan, where I went to high school, and my dad made root beer too, including a constant supply of it from sometime after Thanksgiving through the New Year. I loved his homemade root beer. As for sassafras tea, no; I have never tried that.
How 'bout that. I always thought it was a local thing. I just looked...they still have some operating locations. When we lived in Indiana, our dad would park a trailer at Muskegon State Park for the summer and we'd vacation there. Beautiful place back in the 60s. And nowhere near Stephenson. So do you know if your dad made the root beer with sassafras? Did you ever help him collect the ingredients? If I did, I sure don't recall. But now we chat about it, I do remember him making root beer after we moved to Virginia.