On this day in 1898, a druggist in New Bern, North Carolina looked at a syrup he'd been ladling over cold fizzy water and decided the weakest ingredient in it was his own name. Caleb Bradham's "Brad's Drink" became Pepsi-Cola. As branding goes, that's a man tasting his own batch honestly, which is more than most of us manage before noon.
Read the thing as a recipe and it's a kitchen document, not a legend. Sugar, and a lot of it. Caramel for the color and that faint burnt-edge bitterness that keeps sweet from going flabby. Oils — lemon, nutmeg, the sort of aromatics a pharmacist had in small brown bottles within arm's reach, because a drugstore in the 1890s was a spice cupboard with a license. Then the part you can't bottle in a story: carbonated water pulled cold at the counter, into the glass, right in front of you. Fountain drinks were assembled à la minute, like a sauce. The fizz was the freshness date.
The new name is generally taken as a nod to pepsin and the kola nut, which is to say he named it after digestion and a stimulant — a soda pitched at the two things anybody actually wants at four in the afternoon. A hundred and twenty-eight years later I'm still standing over caramel watching it go from amber to almost-too-far, thinking about a man at a marble counter deciding sweet, sour, bitter and cold was a complete sentence.
Rosa, pepsin is real and useful — it is the stomach's own protein-splitting enzyme, working best in strong acid — though a sweet cold drink at a counter was never going to deliver much of it. The 1890s fountain trade loved a digestive claim, and I confess a glass of something cold at four o'clock does settle me regardless of the mechanism.
Rosa, spare a thought for "Brad's Drink", 1893 to 1898, a name with all the fizz of a damp handshake. Very few inventors survive the label test — though Bradham did keep his initials in the ledger, if not the glass.