

” Varelas explains, “Chelating agents are in a lot of foods because they prevent taste spoiling, preserve the color and improve the shelf life of the product.” Citric acid, which keeps your Dew doin’ what it do. Citric acid is used for flavoring, but it’s also a “ chelating agent. Much of that is going to be citric acid, which is also the next ingredient in Mountain Dew. So all you need to understand here is that it’s an orange all squished up, minus any excess water. The third ingredient is concentrated orange juice, but Varelas explains that, to break that down, it would take explaining every single element inside of an orange, which could fill paragraphs worth. Both of these are simple sugars, and they both have the same chemical formula of C 6 H 12 O 6, though they’re arranged differently on the molecular level. The second ingredient is high fructose corn syrup, which Varelas explains is a sugar replacement that consists of a mixture of glucose and fructose. Carbonated water is mostly H2O, but with some CO2 mixed in. The first ingredient on the list, carbonated water, is only a bit more interesting than it’s non-carbonated counterpart, as most of it is going to be H 2 O with the occasional bit of carbon dioxide (or CO 2 ) in there as well. Calcium disodium EDTA (to protect flavor).Mountain Dew’s current ingredients list is as follows: That covers the first kind of dew, so let’s move on to the one made by Pepsi. To get things started, Varelas explains that dew is just regular old water, consisting of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms.


However, YouTuber and chemistry graduate student Johnny Varelas was happy to take this on and agreed to break down both mountain dew and Mountain Dew, all the way to the molecular level. To answer these obviously important scientific questions, I reached out to several dozen chemists, most of whom ignored me or turned me down flat. If Mountain Dew isn’t actual dew, how does it compare to its namesake? Are they similar in any way? How do they differ? Can boring-old clear dew even remotely compare to the neon-yellow Mountain Dew ? And while we’re at it, which is superior, Dew or dew? Then Pepsi bought the product in 1964, and the rest, as they say, is history.īut I’m still stuck on the name. Eventually, people figured out that Mountain Dew was pretty rad in its own right, so they began drinking it sans-whiskey. Intended as a mixer for whiskey, the brew got its name from the slang term “mountain dew,” which referred to mountain-brewed moonshine. So then, why the misleading name? Well, Mountain Dew was born in 1932 in the foothills of Tenessee’s Smoky Mountains. , some water sources for Pepsi products may be mountain-adjacent, but they are most certainly not dew - of that, you can be sure. Sure, with over 100 factories here in the U.S. I know this may come as a life-shattering surprise to you, but the delicious, citrus-packed, caffeine-loaded, brotastic soft drink known as Mountain Dew is not - nor does it contain - actual dew from a mountainside.
