Good morning, Morning Rounders! This is Greg, your local Event Specialist with Trivia Mafia, and I'm here to rouse you from sleep with another food-and-bev-themed missive. Today, we're heading uphill to talk Mountain Dew.

This topic had a collision with my primary role (Private Events! Book yours today!) as I prepared a custom round for a developer that was celebrating the release of the newest game in their flagship franchise. I knew they'd put in a lot of late nights and early mornings, so it seemed apt to test their knowledge of flavors of Mountain Dew.

And reader, let me tell you, there are a LOT of flavors and varieties of Mountain Dew. But it wasn't always this way! Mountain Dew has a simple (and honestly kind of inspiring) history. It came about when two brothers named Ally and Barney Hartman moved from Georgia to Tennessee. As many Americans do, they enjoyed whiskey, but the move to Tennessee moved them away from a local lemon-lime soda called Natural Set-Up (enriched with Vitamin B), their mixer of choice. So they got to work on replicating it.

The name Mountain Dew is an old-timey euphemism, in fact, for moonshine. This brew was often crafted in rural stills secreted away in America's foothills, especially during prohibition. And as the Hartman brothers branched out to hawk their new formula at bottling conferences nationwide, they brought that homegrown connection along with them. Slogans included "Ya-hoo, Mountain Dew!" and "It'll tickle your innards," which is just on the wrong side of unsettling to this writer.

Eventually, a bottling company came along and took Mountain Dew nationwide, and PepsiCo bought it in 1964. They eased back on the hillbilly marketing and gave the drink its trademark electrified-chartreuse color. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, the high-altitude-named soda became a natural vehicle for Pepsi to market to the new extreme/action sports market, sponsoring such events as the X-Games, Vans Triple Crown, and these days even drone racing. Drone racing! In case you weren't sure if we're living in a cyberpunk future yet, we are.

The great flavor schism came about in 2001, though, when the company released a cherry-flavored variant called Code Red. The first five decades of Mountain Dew's lifespan fit on two pages of that last link. Since the year 2001, there are 5,000 words of new flavors, exclusive Slurpees, Sweet Lightnings (a KFC-exclusive flavor designed to accompany fried chicken), an entire Baja Blast sub-lineage (including an exclusive flavor you could only get by submitting codes from three other Baja Blast flavors) and seemingly endless permutations on the way. There is simply too much to encapsulate in one entry of this newsletter.

Some of these permutations have been truly soul-shaking. The first VooDew flavor (a mystery flavor released each Halloween) was revealed to be Candy Corn. Last year's holiday season brought a truly abominable homunculus of a flavor called Gingerbread Snap'd. This summer gave us the PepsiCo brand mashup truly nobody asked for called Flamin' Hot. And this year's holiday flavor is Fruit Quake, a liquified ode to the seasonal punchline that is fruitcake. And it brings me no pleasure to report this first-hand: it's actually pretty good. It's ambiently fruity, it's lightly spiced, it's extremely sugary. As such, I honestly plan to use it (bringing this entry full-circle) as a compliment to whiskey. Although Peggy Olson would certainly judge me for it.

Thanks so much for reading! And again, if you'd like Trivia Mafia to bring you some Private Events magic this holiday season, our small-but-mighty team is standing by to make something special for you, whether that be in person, online, or a mix of both. You could watch a short video our TikToker-extraordinaire Megan made about them! The occasional Mountain Dew might be fueling my way through these busy calendar months, which are quickly filling up. So don't delay!