Mountain Dew is everywhere these days, and this highly-caffeinated, electric-colored
drink is definitely marketed toward a crowd looking to live life on the edge.
You might think you know everything there is to know about this neon drink, but Mountain
Dew has a rather rocky history.
Long before it became a soda, the term "mountain dew" was a nickname for moonshine, so it's
not entirely surprising that today's Mountain Dew was born in the foothills of the Smoky
Mountains in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Sources vary, but it was some time in the 1930s or 40s that brothers Barney and Ally
Hartman created a mixer to make whiskey taste better.
Knoxville historian and author Jack Neely says it wasn't caffeinated, and it was originally
just for their own use.
Why go to such lengths?
The brothers' favorite bourbon mixer, a lemon-lime drink called Natural Set-Up, wasn't available
when they moved to Tennessee, so they decided to make their own.
The brothers named the beverage Mountain Dew, joking that it tasted just like moonshine
when mixed with liquor.
They decided to put a Tennessee moonshiner on the logo and market the drink as a, quote,
"zero-proof hillbilly moonshine that will tickle yore innards."
The pair expanded distribution outside Knoxville but sales stalled, and the company began to
struggle after Barney Hartman tragically died of a heart attack.
Combining brown liquor with vibrant green soda isn't the first thing that comes to mind
when you're thinking of a mixer, but luckily that wasn't what the Hartman brothers were doing.
The original Mountain Dew was a caffeine-free, clear, lemon-lime flavored beverage, similar
to 7UP or Sprite.
The Hartman brothers sold Mountain Dew to the Tip Corporation of Marion, Virginia, but
the drink needed a makeover to boost sales.
Here's where history gets a little murky.
Some say that Bill Jones of the Tip Corporation started tweaking the formula, adding a little
tang to the drink.
Others say that Johnson City, Tennessee, is the true home of Mountain Dew because Tri-City
Beverages plant manager, Bill Bridgeforth, started adding his Tri-City Lemonade to Mountain
Dew bottles, and the more citrus-forward version took off.
No matter which version is true, one thing is indisputable: Mountain Dew became the electric-colored,
highly caffeinated beverage it is today, and people loved it.
Today's Mountain Dew deftly targets its advertising towards young males living exciting lifestyles,
but that type of marketing happened long after Pepsi bought the brand in 1964.
Strangely, the original Mountain Dew bottles were decorated with a shoeless hillbilly who
carried a rifle and a jug of moonshine, a throwback to Mountain Dew as a nickname for
moonshine.
Pepsi kept the hillbilly image when they bought the soda, hoping to capitalize on the popularity
of the hillbilly lifestyle from The Beverly Hillbillies TV show.
As time went on, Pepsi started marketing to a younger crowd, adopting the "Do the Dew"
tagline and dropping the hillbillies bit in exchange for images and spokespeople that
appealed to a more high-octane, thrill-seeking crowd.
"The goal is to get from point A to point B as creatively as possible, so technically
they are doing Parkour, as long as point A is delusion and point B is the hospital."
So what is the ingredient that gives Mountain Dew its electric color?
The synthetic food dye tartrazine, better known as Yellow 5.
This dye is FDA approved and gives many foods a boost of yellow color.
It's used in somewhat high quantities in a soda as vibrant as Dew.
Although no one knows where the rumor began, Snopes discredits urban legends about various
health problems it might cause.
That doesn't make it any less of a controversial ingredient, though.
Companies in the US are required to list Yellow 5 on an ingredients list as some people have
a sensitivity to it, and the ingredient is banned in Norway and Austria.
The other interesting ingredient is BVO, or Brominated Vegetable Oil.
BVO was a common ingredient in sports drinks and soda, as it helps to distribute the flavor
evenly throughout the drink.
But it's increasingly controversial, and it's already been banned in Europe and Japan.
Mountain Dew parent company PepsiCo did announce in 2014 that they would be removing the ingredient
from some beverages, and did take it out of Gatorade, but, as of the making of this video,
not Mountain Dew.
Mountain Dew's electric color has opened up doors for the soft drink company, and its
makers released spin-off flavors in just about every color of the rainbow.
There's the exclusive Taco Bell flavor, Mountain Dew Baja Blast, with its epic aquamarine color
and lime-forward flavor.
In 2019, KFC announced its first exclusive Mountain Dew flavor, Sweet Lightning, a peach-
and honey-flavored soda that was specifically created to pair well with the chain's signature
fried chicken.
In addition to their exclusive restaurant deals, Mountain Dew has an incredible collection
of flavors available at the grocery store.
Some of the top flavors include the vibrant orange Live Wire, dark berry Black Label,
and Code Red.
Mountain Dew has rolled out several throwback versions, including a Mountain Dew Throwback
made with real sugar released in 2009.
Their 2015 version, called DEWshine, didn't fare as well.
The clear soda looked very similar to the original lemon-lime version, and it was made
with real sugar, just like the original.
But considering Dewshine is also a nickname for Mountain Dew mixed with racing fuel, a
mixture that has proven deadly, it's not surprising it was discontinued.
Like most soft drinks, Mountain Dew is loaded with sugar.
Unfortunately for their die-hard fans, it comes with a ridiculous amount of the stuff.
A 20-ounce bottle has a shocking 77 grams of sugar, and it's the equivalent of what
you would find in over eight sugar cookies.
Let's think about it another way: Harvard School of Public Health estimates that every
teaspoon of sugar weighs about 4.2 grams.
So our 77 grams is 18 teaspoons, or more than a cup.
It's no wonder we eat, on average, 75 pounds of sugar a year.
"75 pounds of sugar.
That's like eating Michael Cera's weight in sugar every single year."
Let's put this another way: the American Heart Association recommends women limit their sugar
intake to 25 grams per day, and men limit themselves to 38 grams per day.
That's way less than what's in that single bottle.
Now, let's talk about caffeine.
When Mountain Dew was re-tooled from being a whiskey mixer to a stand-alone soda, one
of the things they added was caffeine.
According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a 12-ounce bottle of Mountain
Dew contains 54 milligrams of caffeine.
That might not seem like that much when compared to a 12-ounce Starbucks coffee's 235 milligrams,
but when compared to Coca-Cola Classic's 34 milligrams and Pepsi's 38 milligrams, it's
a big jump.
In the 1980s, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration tried to eliminate added caffeine from soft drinks.
Manufacturers argued that caffeine was used as a, quote, "flavor enhancer," and the agency
agreed to continue allowing it.
Would Mountain Dew be the same without it?
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