Do the Dew Dumplings

Reader Contribution by Allan Douglas
Published on March 1, 2011
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This time around I’ve elected to poke into the history of something that is near and dear to my heart on a couple of fronts.  The soda pop marketed as Mountain Dew is one of my favorite “treat” beverages (I prefer the diet version), and the term “mountain dew” has been slang for moonshine for hundreds of years.  The Tennessee county where I live has a well-deserved reputation for having been the moonshine capital of the world during the heyday of that illegally produced corn whiskey. There is even a moonshine museum in Cosby!  Sorry, they do not give out samples.

 Mountain Dew was born here in the hills of Tennessee in the 1940s. Barney and Ally Hartman, who ran a bottling plant in Knoxville, coined the name of their product from the colloquial term for moonshine whiskey. The Hartman’s Mountain Dew, however, was a lemon-lime flavored mixer for whiskey, not originally intended to be drunk alone. But that changed quickly enough.

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