Dr. Pepper Vs. Mountain Dew

Ah, I remember the days of old when soft drinks were made with real sugar and came in returnable bottles. You even had to do a little extra work getting the crown cap off with a bottle opener. A little more trouble than the twist off, but once in a while those twist off caps are screwed on so tight that I can't get them off at all. It's embarrassing to ask the 100-pound female clerk at the 7-Eleven to do it for me.

The other thing about the screw off is that you can't play bottle caps with them. Bottle caps was a game that we played while I was growing up where you threw one of the crown caps at a batter who stood there holding a broom stick. If he made contact at all with the hard-to-see bottle cap, he scored a home run. The best thing was that you could get a whole bucket full of them free from the neighborhood bar.

Being brain washed by advertising goes back a long time, just like the soft drinks. Most of the ones that we have today were invented in the 1800's. Coke and Pepsi started out as patent medicines. Coke gave you a burst of energy and made you feel better. We all know that it had real cocaine in it, hence the name. Pepsi came around shortly after and was called "Pepsi" not because it gave you pep, but rather because it was supposed to help your digestion by containing pepsin, an enzyme that aids in digesting food.

Dr. Pepper and 7-Up are two popular soft drinks that started as patent medicines. 7-Up was so called because of the "billion bubbles" that it supposedly contained. Who sat around counting all of them I'll never know. It was supposed to boost your mood. Dr. Pepper was so much a patent medicine that it even had doctor in its name. It was invented by a doctor in Texas. You could also drink it hot if you had a cold or the flu.

grew up in the sixties and it seemed that a lot of drink companies were coming up with flavors to compete with the big guys, Coke and Pepsi. A beer brewing company here in St. Louis came up with a product that was called "Apple Beer." Their slogan was "Apple Beer is Here." It was brewed just like real beer and had a sort of hoppy flavor.

We kids thought that it was cool, even though it only had a tiny fraction of alcohol in it. Root beer seemed bigger back then than it does now. At least there seemed to be more brands. We had A&W of course, but we also had Hires, Vess, and Frosty, as well as 3V.

Hires used to come in powder form so you could make your own root beer at home. Hires was cool because it came in a brown bottle that looked just like a beer bottle. There were a whole lot of other brands back then that have since become obsolete like 3V and Royal Crown, although occasionally you still see some Royal Crown around.

One question that seems to have been around forever is "Which do you prefer, Coke or Pepsi?" Despite what the old Pepsi commercials said, Coke usually beats out Pepsi in most surveys, but only by a small margin. Mountain dew was introduced a little later than some of the other soft drinks. Premiering in the late sixties, the original advertising slogan was: "Yahoo! Mountain Dew."

It showed a picture on the bottle of what appeared to be an Ozark hill folk enjoying a bottle of the Dew. You have to remember that this was the time that the Beverly Hillbillies was a popular hit on TV. Recently, the St. Louis Post Dispatch launched a contest between Mountain Dew and Dr. Pepper, two soft drinks that most people who don't like Coke or Pepsi drink.

It's too early to tell but so far Dr. Pepper is beating out Mountain Dew by a pretty hefty margin. That's surprising because "The Dew" is such an "in" drink with the young people that there have even been rumors started about it, albeit negative ones: Drinking too much Mountain Dew can cause your testicles to shrink and your sperm count to be low? Dude.



Source: http://www.stltoday.com/lifestyles/columns/joe-holleman/article_00daf97c-74df-11e0-ab37-001a4bcf6878.h