Mountain Dew
carbonated soft drink brand

Mountain Dew, stylized as Mtn Dew in some countries and colloquially known as Dew in some areas, is a soft drink brand owned by PepsiCo. The original formula was invented in 1940 by Tennessee beverage bottlers Barney and Ally Hartman. A revised formula was created by Bill Bridgforth in 1958. The rights to this formula were obtained by the Tip Corporation of Marion, Virginia. William H. "Bill" Jones of the Tip Corporation further refined the formula, launching that version of Mountain Dew in 1961. In August 1964, the Mountain Dew brand and production rights were acquired from Tip by the Pepsi-Cola company, and the distribution expanded across the United States and Canada.
Between the 1940s and 1980s, there was only one variety of Mountain Dew, which was citrus-flavored and caffeinated in most markets. Diet Mountain Dew was introduced in 1988, followed by Mountain Dew Red, which was introduced and discontinued in 1988. In 2001, a cherry-flavored variant called Code Red debuted. Expansions of the product line have continued to this day, including specialty offerings, limited time productions, region-specific and retailer-specific flavors of Mountain Dew.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Mountain Dew” as carbonated soft drink brand. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as carbonated soft drink brand. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q896. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1940, 1958, 1961 and 1964.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mountain Dew” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.