Home › At the Fountain › Club Kola
Club Kola
Make a syrup of 2 drams fluid extract kola, 6 drams tincture cinchona, enough fruit syrup to make 32 ounces. Make the fruit syrup by mixing ounces wild cherry phosphate syrup, 4 ounces vanilla syrup, 4 ounces syrup, 4 ounces lemon syrup, and 4 ounces strawberry syrup. Serve
This is a druggist's formula from the era when the soda fountain sat at the back of a pharmacy, and it is written in apothecary measure for two ingredients that are drugs rather than foods. The notes below explain the units and the text's gaps, and why the syrup should not be compounded today.
- Tincture of cinchona is the problemCinchona bark tincture is a quinine preparation, and quinine is a drug with a narrow margin: it causes thrombocytopenia and hemolytic reactions in susceptible people, and the FDA caps quinine in carbonated beverages at 83 parts per million. Six fluid drams of an alkaloid tincture of unstated strength, in a syrup meant to be drawn by the glass, is an unmeasurable and potentially out-of-range dose.
- Fluid extract of kolaFluid extract of kola nut is a concentrated caffeine preparation, roughly a 1:1 extract of the nut by weight. Two fluid drams is a pharmaceutical quantity, not a flavouring, and like the cinchona it is dosed here with no assay and no control over how much any one customer drinks.
- Both are alcoholic tincturesFluid extracts and tinctures are made with strong alcohol as the menstruum. That was unremarkable behind a 1900s fountain counter and is another reason the formula does not translate into a modern kitchen.
- What a dram isA fluid dram is one-eighth of a fluid ounce, about 3.7 ml, so 2 drams is roughly a teaspoon and a half and 6 drams exactly three-quarters of an ounce. Weight drams and fluid drams are different units, and soda books of this period used both, sometimes on the same page.
- The text drops a quantity"Mixing ounces wild cherry phosphate syrup" is missing its number, almost certainly a typesetting loss. The remaining four syrups at 4 ounces each total 16 ounces of a 32-ounce batch, so the wild cherry phosphate was probably meant to carry a good part of the balance.
- "4 ounces syrup" is ambiguousUnqualified "syrup" in a fountain book normally means plain simple syrup, the neutral sweetened base every counter kept in bulk. It could also be a repetition error for one of the flavours listed around it; the original does not settle the question.
- Wild cherry phosphatePhosphate syrups were flavour syrups acidulated with solution of phosphoric acid, which gave fountain drinks a dry, mineral tartness quite unlike citric acid. Wild cherry syrup itself was made from wild cherry bark, a pharmacy cough-syrup flavour rather than a fruit one.
- If you want a kola drinkUse a current commercial cola syrup or a modern published formula. Nothing in this entry should be reconstructed with drug-strength botanical extracts.
This is a period-typical answer to the kola craze that followed Coca-Cola's spread out of Atlanta in the 1880s and 1890s. Kola nut, imported from West Africa, was promoted in the American pharmaceutical press of that decade as a stimulant and "nerve tonic," and cinchona bark was the standard bitter tonic of the nineteenth-century dispensary, the same material that gave Indian tonic water its name and its bite. The formula shows how thoroughly the soda fountain still belonged to the druggist: the flavour comes from bottled fruit and phosphate syrups any counter stocked, but the active part is measured in apothecary drams from the prescription shelf. Formulas of this kind were steadily reined in after the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the labelling and standards regimes that followed, and the surviving colas kept the caffeine while shedding the bark tinctures.