Wainscott Worthy – An Ale-8-One Story
story by Donna Hecker & photography by Talitha Schroeder
It’s good, but is it Wainscott-worthy? We were at Winchester, Ky.'s Ale-8-One plant on a tour with a merry little band of some of their top brass, and one of the first things we learned was what happens when a new product isn’t pronounced Wainscott-worthy. It goes right back to the drawing board.
Wainscott was George Lee Wainscott, the founder of Ale-8-One; his chance encounter with a newfangled carbonation machine led to a lifelong quest to produce delicious sodas. One of the first was Roxa-Kola, named for his wife Roxanne. While he awaited the outcome of a lawsuit brought by America’s biggest cola company, Wainscott thought it prudent to explore other flavorings as well.
He liked the taste of ginger beer, popular in northern Europe at the time, but wanted to soften it a bit for the hometown audience. The resulting citrus and ginger drink made its debut at the 1926 Clark County Fair, where a young patron submitted the winning name – “A Late One”, 1920s slang for the newest hot thing.
George Wainscott mixed each batch of the flavoring base for Ale-8-One by hand and the original formula is still a family secret. Today, his great-great-nephew Fielding Rogers ascends the spiral staircase to a private locked office every few weeks or so to mix the next round of concentrate, following George’s handwritten notes, still posted on the wall.
When CEO Ellen McGeeney joined the Ale-8-One team in 2013, she asked Fielding about a contingency plan should he ever be unable to mix the concentrate. They decided to keep it in the family and now a few other relatives have access to the recipe just in case.
On the day we were there, bottles of pawpaw soda were traveling down the bottling line, and Ellen pulled an icy cold one off the conveyor belt for each of us. The popular flavor, just now in its second limited season, is the love child of a collaboration between Ale-8-One and the world-famous pawpaw research program at Kentucky State University.
Daphne Phipps is a homegrown Winchester girl who’s now Director of Product Excellence and Innovations at Ale-8. She told us about the first time she gave Dr. Kirk Pomper, KSU’s longtime pawpaw research leader, a taste of the new soda. Not only did he approve, he told Daphne he knew exactly which tree the fruit had come from!
If pawpaws are new to you, they’re a native American fruit, the northernmost member of a family that also includes the soursop. The pawpaw thrives on hot summers and cold winters, making Kentucky the perfect place to call home. And for more than two decades, Dr. Pomper and his colleagues at KSU have been studying, cultivating, and educating the rest of us about this native wonder, sometimes called the Kentucky banana.
Pawpaw Ale-8-One hit the grocery shelves this week and folks are already snapping it up by the case. Some stores have posted limits on shoppers’ purchases but nothing seems to dampen their enthusiasm for it.
There are even calls to give Pawpaw Ale-8-One a permanent spot in the Ale-8 flavor lineup but pawpaws are special – they have a very limited season and can’t be juiced like other fruit; their unique flavor has to be extracted.
And the fact that this family-owned, small town Kentucky-based company put the time and effort into developing an original soft drink out of a little-known native Kentucky fruit is something that couldn’t have happened anywhere else in the world. Does it make us proud to be Kentuckians? You bet it does. And is it Wainscott-worthy? Absolutely.
Happy 100th Ale-8-One! Here’s to the next century of delicious innovation!
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Aunt Margaret Highball
Stir up a couple of these highballs, settle in for a long summer spell and celebrate Ale-8’s 100 years with us!
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