With easy access to the herbs and spices of a Minneapolis tea shop — her brother owns it — one-woman soda maker Eva Duckler, 18, is betting you haven’t ever tasted a root beer like hers.

Occupation: Founder of Tree Fort Soda (treefortsoda.com)

Age: 18

Tell us about your root beer. It’s different from most everything out there, right? It’s really interesting. It’s definitely stronger, with botanical flavors and not the really syrupy root beer you get at the store.

How did you get interested in making your own? Ever since I was little, I really liked trying every weird flavor of soda, especially root beer. I was so into it, I would take notes on it late at night. Then I started working at Verdant Tea in Minneapolis, which my brother owns. He had me making soda syrups for drink specials in the commercial kitchen there, and that got me started making my own root beer. At first, I called it botanical brew because it didn’t taste enough like root beer. People really liked it, so I experimented and got it to where it tasted more like root beer, and that was a really big hit, too.

Where is your root beer sold? At the Seward and Linden Hills co-ops (in Minneapolis) right now. It’ll be at Lakewinds Co-op (in Richfield) on tap, and you can get it on tap at Verdant Tea.

Is your brother (David Duckler of Verdant Tea) helping with the business? Since he started his own business and knows a lot, he has been helping me a lot. I do all the operations, and he does all the wholesale and administrative aspects.

What are your goals? I was planning to go to Wellesley College in Massachusetts. But just recently it became clear that I would have to give up either the business or school, so I decided to defer college for a year. By the end of this year, I want to have these really great herbal sodas. I want to grow this business as much as possible. I want to revive the craft soda, using the finest quality ingredients.

Why use those kinds of ingredients — real sugar, honey, fancy botanicals? It would have been easy to go to all sorts of artificial colors and sweeteners and flavors. But I had access to all of these herbs, because I was working at a tea house. I got to experiment with what root beer would have tasted like when it was first used medicinally — back then, it was alcoholic. That’s what I was trying to do initially.

Did you research the origins of root beer? I did a lot of research and found root beer wasn’t popularized until the 1950s and 1960s, when artificial flavors were developed. I wanted to go back to the origins. I made 50 or 60 different batches before I made something I thought was servable.

Is there an ingredient that would surprise people? Marigold. That’s sort of a nontraditional ingredient. The flavor is not floral, like you would expect. It’s sort of dark and vanilla-y. It gives it a depth of flavor.

What made you decide to try that? I reached a point where I felt really stuck, so I started looking at all these herbs and spices. I tried a marigold tea with hot water and realized the flavor would be great in there.

When you go to college, what will you study? This opportunity really opened itself up for me. I didn’t go into this thinking I would make it a really big business. I’m going into school with an open mind, and I think something will open itself up for me there, too.

What’s next? I hope to work on more flavors. I have a ginger ale that’s almost ready. My goal is to finish a cola and a cream soda before the end of the year. I’m also looking for a larger space, a small warehouse space so I can bottle and brew on a much larger scale. There’s a waiting list right now for the root beer. I’m the only person who is brewing and bottling. It’s really hard for me to have the output that people are demanding. As soon as I can make more, there will be more stores carrying it as well. By the time I go to school next year, I’ll need to find someone who can do my job.