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In 1926, soft drink entrepreneur G. L. Wainscott hit the beverage jackpot. After years of manufacturing various flavored sodas, he created the taste that would make addicts of the residents of his hometown of Winchester, Ky. The flavor fell somewhere between a ginger ale and lemon-lime with a spike of caffeine. All he needed was a catchy name.
“Mr. Wainscott held a contest, and some young girl came up with Ale-8-One and the pun ‘A Late One,’ meaning the latest thing in soft drinks,” Carolyn White, assistant to the president, says.
Kentucky’s soft drink has finally made the 100-mile trek north to Cincinnati store shelves, and it’s mainly thanks to Coca-Cola.
White says, “Coke came in and wanted to buy the company. That was not an option. So they said, ‘Can we distribute?’ and that was an option.”
The deal with Coca-Cola Enterprises expands the company from what they call their core area (a 70-mile radius from the Kentucky factory, requiring only 18 trucks to supply) to 70 counties in Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana. The August opening of a bottling factory in Indianapolis will help supply the additional area.
Around the small town of Winchester, located slightly southeast of Lexington, it’s hard to turn a corner without seeing some evidence of the local drink. Their old-fashioned vending machines hunch beside slick Coke machines. Gas station and supermarket shelves are stacked high with the thick, green returnable bottles. Even most chain restaurants carry Ale-8, as the locals call it, on their fountain taps.
“The customers demand it,” production manager Mark Wiggington says.
The light, citrus-ginger flavor defies normal soda categories, and it seems everyone has their own way of describing it. “It’s a ginger-based soft drink that quenches your thirst, and it doesn’t have any aftertaste like a cola does,” White offers.
The expansion is big news in the world of Ale-8, which has been relatively unchanged since its inception. The current logo is the original logo. The secret formula has never been altered. The company has remained in family hands.
Ale-8 President Frank Rogers III is Wainscott’s grandnephew, and he shares ownership of the company with his three kids. The oldest, Fielding Rogers, already knows he wants to work in the company when he gets his business degree. He’s spending this summer working in the taste lab with his dad as they continue their quest for a diet version indistinguishable from the regular.
The diet version will double the product line. Wainscott’s other flavors were discontinued in the ’70s — “They weren’t very good,” White remembers — leaving just one drink. Around that time the factory also moved from downtown to its current site nestled between I64 and the usual highway burst of fast food and gas stations.
The factory is smallish and unremarkable on the outside. Inside it’s spotlessly clean and slightly citrus scented, understandable because that is one of the dozen ingredients. The clink of bottles is loud enough to cause line workers to wear earplugs.
This factory fills bottles only, returnable and non-returnable. About a dozen workers staff the line.
“We’re filling 500 bottles a minute,” Wiggington says.
The best place to drink a fresh-filled bottle is after it’s capped when it’s still cold. After that it runs through a bottle warmer that reduces condensation. The bottles are still packaged in cardboard six packs, so they need to be dry by the end of the line.
Ale-8 is one of a few remaining companies to use returnable bottles, although they are only used locally. They make it worthwhile to return by giving back a buck-twenty for an empty six pack. The company averages 1,500 cases of bottles returned daily.
Cans and plastic bottles are filled off-site in nearby Elizabethtown, but the secret formula is mixed at the Winches-ter factory and sent over.
And it really is secret — only Rogers and Fielding know the precise ingredients. At 21, Fielding is proof positive that a life of Ale-8 leads to a love of Ale-8. He’s never known a time when there wasn’t a cold one in the fridge. In fact, he clearly remembers the longest time he went without one. “It was when I spent seven weeks abroad — I didn’t think to bring any with me,” he says.
Since he’s been in Virginia for college he’s taken quite a bit with him. On his first trip down he took 40 cases and propped up his dorm room bed to stack them underneath. He’s since claimed to have slowly hooked most of his fraternity brothers on it.
The company is hoping to hook the Tristate area on Kentucky’s soft drink, too. ©
This article appears in Jul 17-23, 2002.