Dr Pepper and the 23 Flavours Mystery
Dr Pepper and the 23 Flavours Mystery
The simplest question in American soft drinks: what flavour is Dr Pepper? Cherry? Plum? Spiced fruit? Caramel with something underneath it? People have been asking this since 1885, and the answer has not improved with time. Dr Pepper is made from 23 flavours. The company that makes it will confirm this. The 23 flavours themselves, however, are a trade secret, stored in two halves in two separate safe deposit boxes in two separate Dallas banks — an arrangement that ensures no single person or document holds the complete recipe. More than 140 years after a pharmacist in Waco, Texas first served it at a drugstore soda fountain, nobody outside that vault knows exactly what is in the glass.The Pharmacist and the Smell of the Fountain
Charles Alderton was a Brooklyn-born pharmacist working at Morrison's Old Corner Drug Store in Waco, Texas in 1885. When he was not filling prescriptions, he mixed soft drinks at the soda fountain — a service common to American drugstores of the era, where customers could order flavoured carbonated water made from any of the dozens of fruit syrups the shop stocked. The soda fountain of the 1880s was extraordinary in its range. Standard flavours included raspberry, orange, pineapple and lemon. Less standard flavours included celery, coffee, rhubarb and clam. The syrup bottles lined the back of the counter and their combined aroma filled the shop.Alderton's idea was simple: bottle the smell of the fountain. Not one flavour — all of them. He began experimenting with combinations of fruit extracts, essences and tinctures in precise ratios, testing them on customers and adjusting the formula. One combination proved consistently popular. Customers began ordering it by name, and the name they used was 'Waco.' Store owner Wade Morrison liked the drink enough to help commercialise it, and gave it a new name: Dr Pepper.
Why Dr Pepper? This is where the certainty ends. The most repeated story attributes the name to a real Dr Charles Pepper of Rural Retreat, Virginia, whom Morrison may have worked for before moving to Texas. One romanticised version suggests Morrison named the drink to win the doctor's approval for marrying his daughter. Historians have examined the Census records and found no evidence that Morrison ever worked for Charles Pepper. As for the romantic version: the daughter was eight years old when Morrison settled in Waco. Keurig Dr Pepper, which now owns the brand, has never confirmed any explanation for the name. The dot after 'Dr' was dropped in the 1950s when a font change made it difficult to read, and was never reinstated. The name has been Dr Pepper — no full stop — ever since.
Older Than Coca-Cola
Dr Pepper was first served commercially in 1885. Coca-Cola followed in 1886. This makes Dr Pepper the oldest major soft drink brand in the United States — a fact that its advocates mention with some regularity. The two drinks have always occupied different cultural territory. Coca-Cola became the universal American soft drink, the one that appeared in every country, on every vending machine, in every corner of global commerce. Dr Pepper remained more specifically American, more regional — particularly strong in the Southern United States and especially in Texas, where it functions less as a beverage category and more as a point of local identity.The drink was introduced nationally in 1904 at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis — the same World's Fair at which the ice cream cone is said to have been invented. Nearly twenty million people attended. By 1891, demand had already outgrown Morrison's drugstore, and a formal company had been established by Morrison and Waco beverage chemist Robert S. Lazenby. The Artesian Manufacturing and Bottling Company building on 5th Street in Waco — completed in 1906 specifically to bottle Dr Pepper — now houses the Dr Pepper Museum, which opened to the public in 1991.
In 1966, the US Food and Drug Administration settled a question that consumers and retailers had been asking for eighty years: what category does Dr Pepper belong to? The answer was none of the above. The FDA determined that Dr Pepper is not a cola, not a root beer and not a fruit-flavoured soft drink. It belongs to its own category, generally referred to as 'pepper soda' — named after the brand that defined it. No other major soft drink sits in this classification. Dr Pepper is, officially, the only thing like Dr Pepper.
The 23 Flavours — What the Company Will and Won't Say
The '23 flavours' claim has been part of Dr Pepper's marketing for decades. What the company has never done is confirm what those 23 flavours actually are. The official ingredient list on a can reads: carbonated water, high-fructose corn syrup, caramel colour, phosphoric acid, natural and artificial flavours, sodium benzoate and caffeine. The 23 flavours are contained within 'natural and artificial flavours' — a legally protected category that requires no further specification. The number 23 is confirmed. The contents are not.Sensory analysts and food writers have spent considerable time attempting to reverse-engineer the profile. The consensus clusters around a few groups: sweet notes including cherry, vanilla, caramel and molasses; spiced notes including clove, cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg; herbal notes including liquorice, sarsaparilla and wintergreen; and tart or fruity notes including lemon, raspberry and blackberry. Whether these are the actual 23 or a reasonable approximation remains open. The company has neither confirmed nor denied specific ingredients — with one exception: prune juice. Dr Pepper has explicitly denied that prune juice is an ingredient, suggesting the claim has been repeated often enough to require a formal response.
In 2009, a shopper named Bill Waters found a ledger book at an antiques store in the Texas Panhandle. The book contained formulas and recipes on letterhead connected to Morrison's Old Corner Drug Store. One recipe was titled 'Dr Peppers Pepsin Bitters.' Enthusiasts examined it closely. Keurig Dr Pepper examined it and declared it a medicinal digestive recipe unrelated to the soft drink formula. The ledger was put up for auction in May 2009 and received no buyers. The formula — whether a fragment of the original, an early variant, or simply a coincidence — remains in private hands, unresolved.
The US Version and the UK Version
Dr Pepper is not produced the same way everywhere in the world. In the United States, Canada and Mexico, it is made by Keurig Dr Pepper using high-fructose corn syrup as the sweetener. In the United Kingdom, Ireland and Japan, it is made under licence by The Coca-Cola Company using sugar. In most of continental Europe, it is produced by Suntory. Three different manufacturers, three slightly different production approaches, one brand name.The sweetener difference is significant to anyone paying attention. High-fructose corn syrup and cane sugar are chemically similar but produce a marginally different flavour profile — HFCS adds a slight additional sweetness that some drinkers describe as a cleaner finish, while sugar produces a slightly rounder, less sharp base note. Whether the difference is detectable in a blind test is debated; whether it is real is not. The two versions are chemically distinct. American soda enthusiasts visiting the UK frequently note the difference. British enthusiasts who have tried the US version tend to have opinions about which is better, and those opinions are not always the same.
The Dr Pepper 23 US Version — stocked at Sweet and Glory — is the American-market formulation: the HFCS version made by Keurig Dr Pepper, distinct from the sugar-sweetened version available in UK supermarkets. It is, in the most literal sense, a different product wearing the same name.
10-2-4 and the Question of When to Drink It
For most of the twentieth century, Dr Pepper was promoted under the slogan '10-2-4' — a recommendation to drink a Dr Pepper at 10am, 2pm and 4pm as an energy pick-up, based loosely on research suggesting blood sugar dips at those hours. The slogan appeared on bottles, in advertising and on the original crown caps. During the Second World War, when sugar was rationed for the war effort, Dr Pepper positioned itself as a low-sugar alternative and the 10-2-4 timing framing gave it a utilitarian, practical edge that suited wartime messaging.The slogan faded but the question of when Dr Pepper tastes best has never entirely disappeared. It is not, most people agree, a breakfast drink. It is not clearly a dessert drink either. It occupies a specific afternoon-into-evening register — sweet enough to feel like a treat, complex enough to work alongside food, cold enough in a can to function as a genuine refreshment. The 23 flavours are doing several things at once, which is the whole point.
