A take off on the old Scots-Irish slang term for moonshine, the iconic American soda brand Mountain Dew was originally intended to be a chaser and/or mixer for sub-par whisky. In the 1930s or ’40s (sources vary on the year), brothers Barney and Ally Hartman created a mixer to make whisky taste better. Apparently it looked and tasted nothing like the current incarnation of Mountain Dew, didn’t contain caffeine, and probably tasted more like 7UP. This was also long before rumors ran rampant at the back of most elementary school buses that Yellow 5, a dye ingredient in Mountain Dew, shrank the male genitalia (fortunately for scores of extreme athletes, this is not true!). The more you know.
