What is mountain dew

He called it "Mountain Dew color," which really didn't push things forward much. We pressed further. If you force me to use an adjective, that's what I'd use.

But I'd prefer, if you write about it, it to be Mountain Dew color. Because there's not really a color we call it. The official BuzzFeed style guide does not recognize "Mountain Dew" as a legitimate color, so we're going to stick with chartreuse.

Mountain Dew tastes like "Yellow. Like the best abstract art, Mountain Dew leaves plenty of room for interpretation. Since first launching as a whiskey mixer in Tennessee in — its name was old-timey slang for moonshine — it has successfully spawned a rainbow of spin-offs of differing colors, tastes, and fundamental natures. The packaging and labels across the different products are not consistent. No Mountain Dew variety looks or tastes like the other, and yet no one challenges their membership in the Mountain Dew family.

Its owners see it as something that transcends the senses. It's a fantastic attitude in a bottle. Some Mountain Dews are yellow, some are red, some are blue. This is apparently what they were shooting for, so the mix is a keeper. When the time came to brand their new drink, Barney and Ally settled on the name Mountain Dew, which is actually old timey slang for moonshine.

The more you know. After a few years of making and drinking Mountain Dew on their own, the Hartmans decided it was time to hock it to the masses. Unfortunately, no local stores were keen on selling it as is. In , they unveiled the rebrand at the Gatlinburg Bottling Convention, which sounds pretty boring but, hey, it was the s. People were buying 7-Up and Sprite, but wanted nothing to do with the Dew. At least, not until 10 years later. The Tip Corporation, which is a strange name for a beverage company, bought the struggling soda company in the hopes of bubbling up some business.

All the Hartmans wanted out of the deal was to buy the owner dinner. McRary writes that when their Orange Crush bottling plant in Georgia failed in , the brothers moved to Knoxville to run a bottling plant for beer and Pepsi Cola. Because soft drinks were sold mainly regionally at that time, Barney and Ally couldn't find a lemon-lime soda to sell, one that could be used as a mixer for cocktails. Then they "privately bottled a lemon-lime mixer they jokingly called Mountain Dew, a nickname for moonshine coined in the 19th century.

They had a hillbilly label printed up, but only bottled the 7UP-style drink for their own after-hours consumption," McRary writes. Eventually, the brothers decided to go public. They put the concoction in green bottles and began selling Mountain Dew in but it didn't sell well.

Meanwhile, the Tri-City Beverage Co. In , Bill Bridgeforth had taken over the business and concocted a lemonade soda called Tri-City Lemonade. According to the book "Mountain Dew: The History" by Bill's son, Dick, flavor and design finally collided in when Bill Bridgeforth began bottling his lemonade soda in Mountain Dew's green bottles. This "new" soda was a hit with consumers.

Vintage sign Bellczar Wikimedia Commons. Now, let's back up a minute — or three years. In turn, the Minges encouraged its parent company, Pepsi, to take a chance on Mountain Dew. The website says, " … the Minges family … through the vision of Hoyt A. Minges Sr. So who invented Mountain Dew? A quote by I. Hugh Slagle, the late vice president of Pepsi bottler Marion Bottling, sums up the difficulty of the question: "Is Mountain Dew the bottle or the drink inside the bottle or the spirit of the people that worked with the drink?

In other words, it took a lot of folks in four cities to make a masterpiece. According to a timeline on Mountain Dew Wiki , a fan site, the hillbilly theme stayed with Mountain Dew until when "Pepsi completely alters Mountain Dew's packaging, abandoning the 'hillbilly' look and changing the logo for the first time since the drink's creation to appeal to a 'younger, outdoorsy generation.

It'll tickle your innards" ad campaign, developed in , was dropped along with the hillbilly image. Several collectible promotional items are in the collection of the East Tennessee Historical Society, which exhibited them in In , the logo was updated to the current "Mtn Dew" styling. The Mountain Dew in Talladega, Ala.

Bernard Troncale. We all love living in The South, right? But just because you love something doesn't make it perfect. Their 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 like the original. What made it unpopular was the criticism that it blurred the lines between alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages.

The bottles were clearly labeled as "non-alcoholic," but the TV commercials marketed the product as "available legally for the first time". The look wasn't the only controversy surrounding this release. Dewshine is also a nickname for Mountain Dew mixed with racing fuel, a mixture that has proven deadly.

The Centers for Disease Control CDC warned that racing fuel is almost entirely composed of methanol, and consuming just one tablespoon is deadly. Limited edition food items can be great, but they can also be disastrous.

Buffalo Wild Wing's Mountain Dew wings are definitely a great example of a Mountain Dew flavor that just didn't work out. A reviewer at the Huffington Post described it as throat-burning with "a weird artificial lime-y flavor.

Japan's Mountain Dew-flavored Cheetos was similarly weird, but they had more of a cult following. They weren't available for long, but they were well sought after, despite mixed reviews.

According to Redditors , the chips tasted like "sweet lemon lime chips" — weird, but not necessarily gross. In , Doritos released their mystery flavored Doritos Quest , which was later revealed as Mountain Dew. Tasters at The Takeout described the chips as being "indistinctly citrus with an odd tang. In what has to be one of the most bizarre legal defenses around, Pepsi defended a lawsuit by proving that Mountain Dew is acidic enough to dissolve a mouse.

In , Ronald Ball bought a can of Mountain Dew that he claimed contained a dead mouse, causing him to become violently ill after the first sip. In their defense, Pepsi submitted an affidavit by veterinarian Lawrence McGill, who testified that a mouse submerged in an acidic fluid such as Mountain Dew would "have no calcium in its bones" after four to seven days. By 30 days of exposure, a mouse would completely disintegrate, to the point that it would actually transform into "a 'jelly-like' substance.

Other experts, however, disputed that claim. Can we say gross? The Madison Record reported that, while Pepsi continued to deny liability, the lawsuit was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.

If you're a big Mountain Dew fan, you might not want to read this part. Like most soft drinks, Mountain Dew is loaded with sugar. Spoon University measured out a ounce bottle's 77 grams of sugar, and it's the equivalent of what you would find in over eight sugar cookies.

Most of us can down a bottle of soda in a few minutes flat, but can you imagine eating that many cookies in one sitting? Let's think about it another way: Harvard School of Public Health estimates that every teaspoon of sugar weighs about 4. So our 77 grams is 18 teaspoons.