Mixer Drinks

Freed from its exclusively medicinal limitations, soda water was found useful in diluting wines and spirits. Lord Byron called for hock and soda water after a drinking bout, and gin and soda water was said to be a favorite tipple of the fast set in the English hunting shires of the 1830s. Brandy and soda later became the drink for gentlemen, and manufactured seltzer and lithia waters were also available as mixers. As soda water became increasingly used as a mixer, many makers gradually reduced its soda content until, eventually, they were applying the name to simple carbonated water. The more scrupulous manufacturer sold such a product as “table water,’ and if his soda water retained a significant soda content, he was quick to advertise the fact.

Natural spa and spring waters, too, were used as mixers. Even in England, the natural waters of continental Europe were still imported despite local imitations. One London supplier in the 1860s offered not only German, French, and Belgian waters but others from Austro-Hungary and the United States.

The first English soft drink developed specifically as a mixer appears to have been tonic water, which began as a palatable means of ingesting the quinine prescribed for sufferers of malaria contracted in the tropics. In 1858 its inventor, Erasmus Bond, patented it as an “Improved Aerated Liquid,” soon known as Indian or quinine tonic water.

Ginger ale seems to have originated a little later, once a method was devised for producing the clear extract of ginger, which distinguished the product from the cloudy ginger beers. A British trade paper of 1876 described the drink as a thing unknown only a few years previously. By then, however, it had become a favorite of the British market and was exported in significant quantities, particularly to America, and principally by the soft-drink firms of Belfast. Indeed, by the turn of the century a trade advertisement was asking: “What go-ahead Mineral Water Maker is there who has not at one time or another longed for the day to come when he would be able to turn out a Ginger Ale equal to the world-famous Belfast Ginger Ales?”