![]() In 2015, they released Dewshine, a vintage-looking glass bottle drink that harkens back to the days of yore. Today, Mountain Dew is the drink of choice for video gamers, skaters and little kids on the beauty pageant circuit.īut PepsiCo, the distributor, hasn’t forgotten the drink’s humble roots in the mountains of Appalachia. The slogan was “It’ll tickle your innards…there’s a bang in every bottle.” As you can see from this 1966 commercial, Willy the Hillbilly uses his “party jug” to impress a curvaceous woman just looking for a mixer for her whiskey. (Every time you Do the Dew today, you have to say, ‘I can say that, I have a hillbilly friend’ to make it less offensive.)Įven back then, the soda was full of sugar and caffeine. By the 1950s, they had wide distribution around Appalachia, probably thanks to the soda’s mascot, Willy the Hillbilly. They had a hard time marketing and selling the soda until they paired with bottlers and retailers around the state, including the family that went on to found PepsiCo. They called it Mountain Dew to increase interest, and as a sort of local inside joke. In the 1940s, brothers Barney and Ally Hartman created a lemon-lime soda in Tennessee that was supposed to mix with homemade whiskey. In fact, the name Mountain Dew was originally a slang term for moonshine in the mountains of Tennessee, West Virginia and North Carolina. It was invented to cut the taste of moonshine to make it palatable. Mountain Dew wasn’t invented to get hipster kids through their improv comedy shows. I’d heard too many urban myths about people’s hearts jumping out of their chests after drinking the mega-high caffeine content soda.īut while everyone else was missing out on SUPERCAFFEINEELEANOR, I was missing out on some fascinating Appalachian history. ![]() One avenue I never explored, no matter how tired or hungover I was, was Mountain Dew. The energy boost you used to get from a 12 ounce can now requires a 20 ounce bottle, and eventually, you need something just a little bit stronger.ĭuring finals or long drives or rehearsal before a receSs show, I would occasionally turn to Red Bull or Monster energy drinks, as painful as they were to get down. ![]() The hard thing about drinking that much Diet Coke is that, eventually, the effects of the caffeine are lessened. ![]() I switched to green tea and La Croix and, occasionally, calorie-bomb peppermint mochas, and I’ve been off Diet Coke for about six months.īut there was a time in my life where I couldn’t be too far from a vending machine without my palms starting to sweat. (See: every sports post we’ve ever written.) But I would like to note that, after almost a decade of drinking 2-3 cans of Diet Coke a day, I finally broke that devil juice’s grip on me. I definitely did not start this blog to brag about my accomplishments. ![]()
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