“Take your medicine, Eric.”
My mother’s command from years ago rings in my ears as Jill Smith, co-owner of Colorado’s Salida Pharmacy and Fountain, explains why flavored sodas were invented in the 19th century—and why most soda fountains were found in pharmacies.
“Back then, medicine was a liquid or a powder that tasted bad. Mix it into a soda, and it was far more palatable,” Ms. Smith says.
I raise my glass of lime-hibiscus phosphate to salute this information and take a deep draught. Phosphates are very old-fashioned soda drinks made by mixing a flavored syrup (cherry is the standard) with carbonated water and a tangy powder or syrup of acid phosphate, which lends a tart element. The result is its own kind of medicine—a unique, flavorful soda, in a charming little outpost of American tradition, in a bustling historic downtown in the Front Range of the Rockies.
John Denver sings “Rocky Mountain High” on the sound system, of course, and a massive century-old mirror from a defunct pharmacy in Del Norte reflects the tradition embodied in this relatively new business, which combines an apothecary and a drinks fountain just as one would’ve found in most American towns before World War II. The atmosphere perfectly fits the soda, and vice-versa.
Tastes great. Less filling.
By that, I mean that the dominant flavor in fountain drinks such as phosphates isn’t sugary sweetness, as in modern commercial sodas—even small-batch artisanal types such as root beer and ginger ale. Instead, the overall effect of a classic fountain drink is lighter, less overbearing, more refreshing. I’ve never acquired the sucrose palate that most Americans have—high fructose corn syrup just tastes bad to me—so when I first discovered soda fountain phosphates years ago, I was delighted.
That was in a fabled fountain and pharmacy in Twin Falls, Idaho, called Crowley’s—the subject of a million U.S. road trip Instagram postings. Alas, Crowley’s closed a while back, and its demise induced fear that this quintessential slice of Americana was now history. Industry observers believe that the 1970s fast-food tidal wave, along with the hegemony of industrial sodas, have turned fountain sodas and soda fountains into anachronisms.
Not so fast.
Soda Fountain Nostalgia
This trend is evident at Seattle’s Pike Place Market where, on a sunny 80-degree spring day, crowds line up out the door to place their order at Shug’s, a stand-alone fountain on First Avenue opened in 2016 for nostalgic purposes. It’s set up in charmingly retro fashion with stools along the fountain bar, Formica table sets, and a kids’ quarter-a-pop bronc ride called Ride the Champion tucked in a corner. Ray Charles and James Brown play on the sound system, and the whole effect is designed to take you back to Memphis in, say, 1966.As with most soda fountains old and new, ice cream and sundaes are also on the menu; also available are espresso drinks and new-age adult concoctions, such as the Prosecco float, made with sorbet.
Ironically, blending in alcohol harkens back to the 19th century and the first heyday of soda fountains, when cocaine, laudanum, and caffeine were widely included in apothecary drink confections. By the 1880s, the widespread availability of devices that produced carbonated water and mixed them into drinks expanded the industry to small towns and big cities alike.
The soda fountain become a mainstream fixture of American life after Prohibition in 1923. No more bars meant a lack of places for people to gather and socialize. The soda fountain filled the gap. “The bar is dead, the fountain lives, and soda is king!” rhapsodized industry observer John Somerset in Drug Topics magazine in 1920.
The bad-tasting prescription medicine I endured as a boy came a century after the cocaine-and-opiate heyday of the 19th century, which ended when the Harrison Act of 1914 outlawed the over-the-counter dispensing of narcotics. By the time my mother had to admonish me to take a spoonful of Tedral, soda fountains had devolved into cinematic gathering places for American teens who couldn’t go to bars, or for adults seeking nonalcoholic refreshment. Picture Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland on fountain stools with tall sundaes and sodas at hand. Today, Americans wishing to visit such iconic environs have to choose from perhaps 100 true soda fountains around the country.
Soda fountains can even bear iconic regional weight. The egg cream, for example, is the signature fountain drink of the Northeast United States, and reaches its greatest heights in New York, where it apparently originated around 1880. Essentially a chocolate seltzer, this one specialty alone is featured at a dozen or so vendors of various sorts around the Big Apple—most notably at Brooklyn Farmacy and Soda Fountain, whose egg cream is widely acclaimed but whose menu, like many of its compatriots today, includes as many specialty ice cream sundaes as it does soda drinks. Opened in 2010, it’s housed in a restored 1920 building in which the floor-to-ceiling wood shelves exalt its early 20th-century life as a neighborhood apothecary. Servers in bow-tied chef shirts make your order by hand.
A Piece of Americana
That proves the most memorable facet of fountain patronage during my visit to Goody’s, another stand-alone soda fountain and ice cream shop in a bustling, leafy neighborhood in Boise, Idaho. The ambiance here is full-on summer family fun. Moms and dads with kids in tow stroll the streets in balmy evening air and eye Goody’s expansive menu with wonder.The servers—artisans who were called, a century ago, “soda jerks”—practice an artful form of customer service that includes answering many questions about what’s what, including phosphates, which most Americans today vaguely imagine has something to do with fertilizer.
But my question is much more arcane than that.
“Can I get a huckleberry phosphate?”
Jenny, a young college student clearly working here on summer break, glances at her fellow soda jerk Amber, raising her eyebrows. “Well, we’re awfully low on huckleberry syrup; you know there hasn’t been much picking this year.” Idaho’s signature fruit grows only in the wild and is harvested by foragers who roam the state’s mountains.
“But,” Amber says as she winks at me conspiratorially, “I think I noticed a jug of it in the back this morning. I’ll go look. We don’t get many requests for a huckleberry phosphate.”
I imagine not.
Five minutes later, when she hands me my huckleberry phosphate, I’m exceptionally glad that I asked—the tangy but light drink represents a modern edition of an American tradition, where every confection is made to order by servers practicing a craft almost two centuries old. You may have to hit the road to sample a huckleberry phosphate, but I promise that it’s worth it in every way.
Know Your Order: 4 Quintessential Fountain Drinks
- Cherry phosphate: The best-known phosphate drink is a simple concoction made with soda water, phosphate, and cherry syrup. Simple it may be, but there is no bottled or canned example that tastes anything like a handmade cherry phosphate at a fountain counter.
- Lime Rickey: Again, simple—lime juice, soda water, sugar syrup, perhaps a fruit flavoring such as raspberry. Today, this is also a common mocktail in bars and restaurants whose workers and patrons likely have no idea of its fountain history.
- Egg cream: What’s in a name? Sometimes, nothing at all. One legendary soda fountain drink is the egg cream—a chocolate item that has neither eggs nor cream in it. No one can explain the name with any certainty, though theories abound. It’s a chocolate seltzer, usually made with Fox’s u-bet syrup that, if you want to try it at home, is available online.
- Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Dr Pepper: Though these are now longstanding mainstays of the mass-production pop business, let’s give them honorable mention. All three were created between 1886 and 1893 by what were then called “druggists” in pharmacies in Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas. Exact formulas for all three remain secret to this day.
