This drink was developed over a period of years, beginning in the 1940s.
Bill Bridgforth of Tri-City Beverage of Johnson City, Tennessee, was instrumental in creating its final formula following a series of experiments in 1958. He was a manager at the company and in 1960 he started bottling Mountain Dew in the green Mountain Dew bottles.
However the story is not beginning there. Two brothers, Barney and Ally Hartman, originated the lime beverage as a mixer in the late 1940s.
They were bottling a lemony drink for themselves as a mixer for Tennessee whisky, and jokingly called it Mountain Dew after the slang term for Tennessee Mountain moonshine.
In 1946, they added a paper label to their mixer bottle showing a hillbilly with a gun and bottle was taken to a convention in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
That mixer was redeveloped in 1954 as a soft drink. It was bottled at Tri-City Beverage by businessman Charles Gordon. Mountain Dew was acquired by the Pepsi-Cola Company in 1964.
The invention of Mountain Dew
