Mt. Dew Got Its Start as a Mixer For Hard Liquor
Mt. Dew, the popular soda from Pepsi, wasn’t a Pepsi product until 1964 when they bought the rights from the Tip Corporation. Pepsi used the campaign ‘Yahoo Mountain Dew…It’ll tickle your innards’. Brothers Ally and Barney Hartman bottled ‘Mountain Dew’ in the 1940’s, but it was mostly local and used to mix hard liquors. In the 1950’s the label changed featuring its makers signatures under the Mountain Dew on the label and featured a hillbilly named ‘Gran Pappy’.
When Pepsi bought Mountain Dew they used the ‘Gran Pappy’ character until 1970 when his popularity began to wane. In 1988 Diet Dew came to the market and the 'Dew the Dew' campaign began in 1993. Today you can get many different Mt. Dew’s including regular, diet, code red, livewire (mixes orange and dew) and pitch black.
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