Snapple Lemon Daze Pink Lemonade

If you are like us here at Thirsty Dudes you have probably drunk some pink lemonade, looked at the ingredients and said to yourself, “Wait, there is no berry juice in here, why is it pink? What makes pink lemonade pink?” Fear not, we have done the 30 seconds of research for you and here are our results.

First off, a lot of companies do use strawberries or raspberries to tint, and flavor their lemonade. That makes perfect sense. It's what I always expected to be the construct of pink lemonade. Over at the Huffington Post website they had an article about the origins of this delicious summer treat. Instead of paraphrasing, here is the exact text:

According to Josh Chetwynd, author of the book, "How the Hot Dog Found Its Bun," there are two main claims to the title of pink-lemonade inventor -- and neither of them sound very thirst-quenching. The first attributes this beverage to a salesman, by the name of Pete Conklin, who sold concessions at the circus. When working a shift in 1857, he ran out of water to make his lemonade (with no access to a nearby well or spring).
Rather than lose out on business, "Pete sprinted into the dressing tent and came across Fannie Jamieson, one of the show's bareback riders. She had just cleaned her pink tights in a vat of water, leaving the liquid looking a deep pink hue." He used the water without a second thought, and sold it as "fine strawberry lemonade." It's reported that he "did double the business of ordinary refreshment and, allegedly, ushered in a new style of the drink."
The second claim to pink-lemonade fame is also a result of a lemonade mishap. According to a 1912 New York Times article, Henry E. Allott -- a circus promoter, saloon-keeper and gambler -- was the originator of this drink. "One day while mixing a tub full of the orthodox yellow kind he dropped some red cinnamon candies in by mistake,” the newspaper wrote. “The resulting rose-tinted mixture sold so surprisingly well that he continued to dispense his chance discovery.” This article, written after Allott had passed away, claims that he invented this drink as a teenager, which would date it to roughly 1872-1873 -- 20 years after Conklin's story.

The first of those sounds absolutely terrible. The second has me intrigued. Those cinnamon candies have a very specific taste that isn't exactly like the spice, but it would go amazing with lemonade. Someone please point me in the direction of a company that makes their lemonade like that, or I'm going to have to try and make some myself.

I'm guessing that modern day companies, don't really use either way, and simply settle for food coloring, if they aren't adding fruit juice. That lemonade is a cop out if you ask me. All flash, no substance. Luckily, Snapple went with fruit juice, mostly for color, but it has a bit of flavor to it. A blind taste test proved this. The testy (get your mind out of your pants) could tell that this was not normal yellow lemonade. It's has a nice sweet, refreshing berry flavor that compliments the tartness of the lemon. For a prepackaged lemonade, that you can find in any city across the US, you could do a whole lot worse than this.