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| Daily What via Reddit User adam1988 |
DUBLIN, Texas
For Dr Pepper drinkers, this is mecca.
Tens of thousands of people trek to tiny Dublin in north-central Texas each year to buy cases of the popular soft drink from a bottling company that uses real sugar in its flagship product. No high fructose corn syrup in sight.
It's been that way since 1891, when Dublin Bottling Works became the world's first bottler of soda pop and the first to distribute the fruit- and berry-flavored carbonated drink that had debuted six years earlier at Wade Morrison's Old Corner Drug Store in downtown Waco, about 80 miles to the east.
In this photo taken Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2009, a Dublin Dr Pepper bottle showing the Imperial Sugar label is shown at the Dublin Dr Pepper bottling company in Dublin, Texas. (AP Photo/Donna McWilliam)(AP)
Dublin Dr Pepper is not the only soft drink that uses sugar. PepsiCo Inc. introduced limited-edition versions of Pepsi and Mountain Dew this year that did, and in some markets Coca-Cola Co. offers a kosher version of Coke using sugar that is available in the weeks preceding Passover. There's also a simmering U.S. demand for Mexican-made Coca-Cola, which uses real sugar.
But Dublin Dr Pepper's signature product has become a favorite of bootleggers who resell it elsewhere and folks from around the world who buy it in person or online.
What separates it from the more widely available version is the taste, according to bottling company owner Bill Kloster and people who love it.
"It tastes different, it doesn't have the aftertaste," Ralph Cherry, a retired teacher from Waco, said recently as he sipped a drink at Old Doc's Soda Shop, the 1950s-style Dublin Dr Pepper store where visitors can tour the plant, get a bite to eat and take home up to 20 cases of 24 cans or bottles per person.
Resourceful drink lovers have found ways to circumvent the 20-case limit, imposed some years back by Dr Pepper Snapple Group Inc., the brand's Plano-based corporate owners, to protect other bottlers.
"A lot of them bring friends," said Lori Dodd, the company's creative services director.
Dodd, who cites "the passion and devotion and loyalty" Dublin Dr Pepper elicits, handles requests like providing the drink for weddings and dinners and even funerals. One woman asked for, and received, four Dublin Dr Pepper bottles to hold her cremated remains — one for each of her children.
Dr Pepper — invented by Morrison's pharmacist, Charles Alderton, and named for the father of a girl Morrison was smitten with — gained national fame at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis.
When franchises were awarded in the mid-1920s, Dublin was Dr Pepper franchise No. 1. It still operates under a 1925 licensing agreement that includes a hand-drawn map restricting its distribution to a 44-mile area around the town of 3,900.
While that makes Dublin one of the smallest Dr Pepper bottlers, it's among the top 10 percent in per capita sales.
In this photo taken Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2009, Bill Kloster, owner of the Dublin Dr Pepper bottling company in Dublin, Texas, poses for a photograph at the bottling plant in Dublin. (AP Photo/Donna McWilliam)(AP)
"You can't help but derive some pleasure having the kind of not just regional recognition or not even state recognition and not even necessarily national," Kloster said. "We kind of have an international presence."
Visitors routinely wait outside for the plant to open to the public at 10 a.m. About 68,000 took the tour last year, seeing the 1936 bottling machine that dispenses an ounce of syrup with every five ounces of 33- to 36-degree water, the 100-pound sacks of sugar and memorabilia from both the Dublin operation and Dr Pepper's history. (The period after 'Dr' got dropped years ago in an ad campaign and didn't return.)
Dodd estimates double or triple the number of tour takers stop by just to buy the soda.
Dublin Dr Pepper sold about half a million units last year, with the most popular being 8-ounce bottles and 12-ounce cans. Within its distribution area, it also sells larger bottles and boxes of syrup for use in fountains.
"It's the taste," said Sarah Fox, who recently detoured from Dallas-Fort Worth, about an hour and a half to the northeast, on her way back home to Lubbock to pick up three cases.
The distinctive taste is attributed to granulated sugar supplied by Imperial Sugar Co., based in the Houston suburb of Sugar Land. Dublin Dr Pepper uses an estimated 425,000 pounds of pure cane sugar each year.
Most soft drink makers switched to high-fructose corn syrup in the 1970s when sugar prices rose.
Kloster's father, also Bill, was running the Dublin plant then with owner Grace Prim Lyon, whose father, Sam Houston Prim, established the Dublin operation in 1891. Dr Pepper sent its bottlers samples of the soft drink with the cheaper ingredient. Lyon and Kloster didn't like it.
"My dad, he was a stubborn old German," son Bill said. "He knew what he liked. And when they came up and said they were going to change to corn syrup, he said: `Nope.' I don't think at the time he did that he had any perception in terms of a marketing ploy. But that's certainly a draw."
While a handful of bottlers now produce a pure sugar version, only the Dublin drink carries both the Imperial Sugar logo and the word "Dublin" incorporated into the normal Dr Pepper logo.
The effect is a brand within a brand — something Kloster said "drives corporate crazy."
Dr Pepper Snapple Group, though, acknowledged Dublin as "one of our most recognized bottlers."
"They've done a good job of tapping into consumer nostalgia," spokesman Greg Artkop said. "They're a good partner and we believe anything that fuels the passion of Dr Pepper fans is great for the brand."
In Dublin, Kloster, 67, is considering building a new bottling plant directly behind the old one. He's the town's biggest private employer, with 35 people.
And all those warnings about sugar being bad for you?
"I think when the evidence is all in, they're going to go back and figure out the high fructose corn syrup was much worse for you than sugar ever was," Kloster said.
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DALLAS – Poking through antiques stores while traveling through the Texas Panhandle, Bill Waters stumbled across a tattered old ledger book filled with formulas.
He bought it for $200, suspecting he could resell it for five times that. Turns out, his inkling about the book's value was more spot on than he knew. The Tulsa, Okla., man eventually discovered the book came from the Waco, Texas, drugstore where Dr Pepper was invented and includes a recipe titled "D Peppers Pepsin Bitters."
"I began feeling like I had a national treasure," said Waters, 59.
Dr Pepper's manufacturer says the recipe is not the secret formula for the modern day soft drink, but the 8 1/2-by-15 1/2 inch book is expected to sell between $50,000 to $75,000 when it goes up for auction at Dallas-based Heritage Auction Galleries on May 13.
"It probably has specks of the original concoction on its pages," Waters said.
Waters discovered the book, its yellowed pages stained brown on the edges, underneath a wooden medicine bottle crate in a Shamrock antiques store last summer. A couple months after buying it, he took a closer look as he prepared to sell it on eBay.
He noticed there were several sheets with letterheads hinting at its past, like a page from a prescription pad from a Waco store titled "W.B. Morrison & Co. Old Corner Drug Store." An Internet search revealed Dr Pepper, first served in 1885, was invented at the Old Corner Drug Store in Waco by a pharmacist named Charles Alderton. Wade Morrison was a store owner.
Faded letters on the book's fraying brown cover say "Castles Formulas." John Castles was a partner of Morrison's for a time and was a druggist at that location as early as 1880, said Mary Beth Webster, collections manager at the Dr Pepper Museum and Free Enterprise Institute in Waco.
As he gathered more information, Waters took a slower turn through the book's more than 360 pages, which are filled with formulas for everything from piano polish to a hair restorer to a cough syrup. He eventually spotted the "D Peppers Pepsin Bitters" formula.
"It took three or four days before I actually realized what I had there," Waters said.
The recipe written in cursive in the ledger book is hard to make out, but ingredients seem to include mandrake root, sweet flag root and syrup.
It isn't a recipe for a soft drink, says Greg Artkop, a spokesman for the Plano-based Dr Pepper Snapple Group. He said it's likely instead a recipe for a bitter digestive that bears the Dr Pepper name.
He said the recipe certainly bears no resemblance to any Dr Pepper recipes the company knows of. The drink's 23-flavor blend is a closely guarded secret, only known by three Dr Pepper employees, he said.
Michael Riley, chief cataloger and historian for Heritage Auction Galleries, said they think it's an early recipe for Dr Pepper.
"We just feel like it's the earliest version of it," he said.
He hasn't, however, tested that theory by trying to mix up a batch. Neither has Waters; he's thought about it but would need to find someone to decipher all the handwriting.
Jack McKinney, executive director of the Waco museum, surmised that Alderton might have been giving customers something for their stomachs and added some Dr Pepper syrup to make it taste better.
"I don't guess there's any definitive answer. It's got to be the only one of its kind," Riley said.
McKinney said the ledger book was bound to be popular with Dr Pepper collectors because it's from the time the drink was invented.
Riley said the book was probably started around 1880 and used through the 1890s. It's not known who wrote the Dr Pepper recipe in the book, but they don't think it was the handwriting of Alderton or Morrison. Some of the formulas have Alderton's name after them.
At first, Alderton's drink inspired by the smells in the drugstore was called "a Waco." "People would come in and say, 'Shoot me a Waco,'" Riley said.
Soon renamed Dr Pepper, the drink caught on and other stores in town began selling it. Eventually, Alderton got out of the Dr Pepper business and Morrison and a man named Robert Lazenby started a bottling company in 1891.
Flipping through the pages of the ledger book takes one back to a time when drugstores were neighborhood hubs, selling everything from health remedies to beauty products mixed up by the stores' chemists. And among the formulas being mixed up in drugstores were treats for the soda fountain. A two-page spread in Waters' book has recipes for "Soda Water Syrups," including pineapple, lemon and strawberry.
"There were very few national brands," Riley said. "Their lifeblood was all their formulas."
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On the Net:
Heritage Auction Galleries, http://www.ha.com
Dr Pepper Museum, http://www.drpeppermuseum.com
A Dr Pepper promotion revolving around Guns N' Roses' new album has gone flat--and the band is getting the misdirected static.
The soda pop maker launched a marketing campaign in March that promised a free soda to "everyone in America" if the rock band released its long-awaited Chinese Democracy album this year. After a 17-year wait, the band finally released the album--and Dr Pepper gave fans 24 hours to go to its Web site to print a coupon for their free soda.
But apparently fans' thirst was greater than Dr Pepper predicted--or prepared for. The crush of visitors to the site crashed the site's servers, leading to a lot of angry fans, some of whom mistakenly blamed the band for their lack of liquid refreshment. Now frontman Axl Rose and his bandmates are ready to pop.
"When you go on the blogs and you read the responses from the fans, they associated Axl with this promotion...and blame him for the fact that they didn't get their free soda," Laurie Soriano, the band's lawyer, told CNN. "We've gone public with the fact that we are not involved but are trying to clean up the mess."
Dr Pepper told CNN that it had "taken great steps" to keep its part of the deal and that it had extended the window for the giveaway from 24 to 42 hours. The drink maker also set up a toll-free line to handle consumer requests for the coupons. All of those measures have since expired.
Despite those measures, the band is still waiting for its apology.
"The door to a lawsuit being filed is always open until the fans are taken care of and Dr Pepper has done the right thing," Soriano told CNN.
AP – An Aug. 31, 2006 file photo shows Guns N' Roses front man Axl Rose posing backstage at the 2006 MTV Video … LOS ANGELES – Dr Pepper is making good on its promise of free soda now that the release of Guns N' Roses' "Chinese Democracy" is a reality. The soft-drink maker said in March that it would give a free soda to everyone in America if the album dropped in 2008. "Chinese Democracy," infamously delayed since recording began in 1994, goes on sale Sunday.
"We never thought this day would come," Tony Jacobs, Dr Pepper's vice president of marketing, said in a statement. "But now that it's here, all we can say is: The Dr Pepper's on us."
Beginning Sunday at 12:01 a.m., coupons for a free 20-ounce soda will be available for 24 hours on Dr Pepper's Web site. They'll be honored until Feb. 28.
Dr Pepper is owned by Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Inc.
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