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Prosperity and Thrift: The Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy, 1921-1929
The story of a pantry shelf, an outline history of grocery specialties: a machine-readable transcription.
A Drink of the Eskimo
Kid
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A Drink of the Eskimo
Kid
Forty Years of Priceless Experience
Have Made Clicquot Club Ginger Ale
Popular from Coast to Coast. Here
Is Told the Tale of the Many Trails
This Pioneer Beverage Has Blazed
Forty Years of Priceless Experience Have Made Clicquot Club Ginger Ale Popular from Coast to Coast. Here Is Told the Tale of the Many Trails This Pioneer Beverage Has Blazed
With so much stress being laid these days on health foods and calories and vitamins, the breakfast food for this and the fruit for that, who is going to come out loud and clear for the values in good, pure ginger ale? Yet all of us drink ginger ale. Most of us keep it in the house constantly, or can easily run around the corner to buy a couple of bottles for the impromptu card party. Billions of dollars are spent every year for soft drinks by us weary Americans. Most of this money is spent for ginger ale. More than 12,000 bottlers are making ginger ale for the American public. That means four and a generous fraction for every city and town in the country of 2,500 population.
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Yet, with all this enormous consumption, what does the public know about the drinks it spends its pennies for? Who makes them? What are they made of? How are they made?
Naturally, among 12,000 brands of ginger ale there are wide variations in quality and purity. Anyone can buy ginger and sugar and fruit juices, blend them with carbonated water and call the result "ginger ale." Fortunately, the forty years' history of one concern making ginger ale is the record of devotion to the aim of improving bottling practices and producing purer, more uniform beverages at a fairer cost. The Clicquot Club Company of Millis, Massachusetts, has held to this purpose consistently throughout its business history, believing that reliable products were a public obligation incurred by every bottler. Perhaps Clicquot Club's position as the world's largest ginger ale makers is the unconscious tribute of the public to so fair an enterprise.
Ginger ale first came to this country under foreign labels about the middle of the last century. It was a luxury of high price and enjoyable only by people of means. When Lansing Millis, a retired Boston railway man, discovered a rather remarkable spring on his farm at East Medway, Massachusetts, he had no reason at all to believe that he had taken the first step toward giving America its most popular beverage in 1925. That was in the early 80's. Ginger ale was still a comparative novelty, but Millis, being somewhat of an epicure, knew and liked this new British beverage. He had a small bottling plant on his farm whose regular work was the bottling of cider. But this new spring gave him an idea, and some experimentation led eventually to a remarkable American ginger ale--"fully as good as the imported"--so good in fact that his friends compared its bubbling clarity with Veuve Cliquot, the queen of French champagnes.
Apparently it is much the same with ginger ales as with the proverbial mouse-trap. The word passed among Millis' club friends in town and, unsought, almost unwanted, an infant industry soon sat on Lansing Millis' doorstep--the business of making Clicquot Club Ginger Ale.
It was not long before commercial enterprise began, but,
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in 1885, only a few months thereafter, Lansing Millis died and the comparatively negligible assets of The Clicquot Club Company were advertised as for sale. Probably the heirs and assigns of the late Lansing Millis were glad enough to pocket a few thousand dollars for a country spring-house, a small frame building holding a little bottling machinery, and such trademarks, good-will, et cetera as pertained to The Clicquot Club Company. Today the spring, the trade-name and the good-will are worth many millions of dollars--and, while the original frame building is gone, in its place is a sunlit, spotless, modern plant, a third of a mile long, whose latest addition--about 25% of its total capacity--is alone larger than any other complete ginger ale plant in the world.
When H. Earle Kimball assumed control of the Clicquot Club assets he was a boy out of college, but the keen heritage of an old Rhode Island ancestry had given him a judgment of values and an imagination that turned a gentleman farmer's hobby into a great national enterprise. If this were not true, how could he have realized that, next to credit, a young bottler's most important asset is a reliable water source?
The Clicquot water supply, arising from deep within the rock of New England at the head waters of the historic Charles River, was the back-log of Clicquot Club prosperity. This never-failing water source has never wavered in purity, so clear as it comes from the ground as to require no filtration. Yet it is always filtered and tested every thirty days for the sake of perfect safety. Many bottlers attempt to make ginger ales of equal quality from aerated city waters, but although Clicquot Club has been offered the option on the majority of America's most famous spring sites they have stuck to the original source, believing that they could never be quite so sure of the quality of their blend when made with any other water.
It has been the same with sugar, ginger and all the lesser ingredients of Clicquot Club. Its sugar is bought at a premium in barrels to secure absolute purity. Clicquot Club buys none but the pick of the Jamaican ginger crop.
However, it has been admitted that anyone can mix these things that go into ginger ale and not make Clicquot Club.
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It is the forty years of priceless experience that make Clicquot Club so uniformly good and popular from coast to coast. If the Clicquot Club policy had been just one of good ingredients, good ginger ales would probably not be made in America today, for in the early days of the Clicquot Club Company beverage extracts were mixed by guess, sanitation was not a science, bottles were charged and capped by hand.
It was Kimball's ambition to give the public a ginger ale as good as ginger ale could be, but at a price that would be fair wherever it was bought. Such an ambition meant volume. Volume meant economical manufacture, which in turn demanded better machinery and better bottling practices.
It is a significant fact that there has been scarcely a single important improvement in the manufacture of carbonated beverages that cannot be traced directly to the Clicquot Club plant at Millis. Clicquot installed the first automatic capping machine. The great modern filling machines in every up-to-date bottler's plant were worked out by engineers who used the Clicquot plant as a laboratory. Clicquot Club has always been the originator of or the first to employ any device or practice that made better ginger ale, if possible at a lower cost to the public.
It goes without saying that publicity had its share in the building of this enormous business. The whimsical Clicquot Eskimo Kid has smiled from millions of magazine and newspaper pages for well nigh twenty years. He beams forth nightly from the largest electric sign in the world in Times Square, New York.
Ginger ale is the principal product of The Clicquot Club Company. Clicquot Club Regular is the same delightful blend that Farmer Millis made over forty years ago. Pale Dry is the subtle, delicate dry ginger ale which commemorates forty years of knowing how to make good drinks. Clicquot Club also makes a delicious Sarsaparilla and a Root and a Birch Beer. And the Clicquot Kid on every bottle is a guarantee of the goodness inside.
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