The Soda That Outsells Coca Cola In Scotland: The Legend Of Irn-Bru

Back in the 1880s, a Confederate army veteran named John Pemberton was trying to fund his opiate addiction by selling cocaine-laced wine, which he marketed as a cure for both constipation and erectile dysfunction (two conditions you definitely want resolved simultaneously). When the local government banned liquor, Pemberton was forced to improvise a replacement beverage on the fly. The result was Coca-Cola, which went on to become the most popular soft drink on Earth, closely followed by similar US sodas. 

Their triumph was so complete that the Soviet Union once paid for a shipment of Pepsi in old battleships, briefly making PepsiCo the sixth most powerful navy on Earth. Fortunately, they didn’t need to invade anywhere, having already conquered the world. But while Coke and its imitators have achieved market dominance in almost every country not actively under trade embargo, there are a few scattered pockets of resistance.

What kind of mystical soda ambrosia could possibly outsell Coke, a drink so delicious that nobody even minded when they took the cocaine out? For an answer, we turned to Scotland, a small country east of Ireland and north of nothing in particular, where a rust-themed concoction called Irn-Bru has outsold every other soda since at least 1947. 

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The Taste Is Impossible To Describe

Now, we know what you’re thinking: To defeat Coke, Pepsi

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and Mr. Pibb, Irn-Bru must have a truly amazing taste. And it does, it’s just that it’s not technically possible to describe that taste using words. It definitely has flavoring, but it all adds up to an actual flavor found nowhere else in nature, and ideally nowhere else in science either. It’s definitely sweet, and there’s a faint hint of metal somewhere in there, but beyond that it’s like trying to describe Cthulhu to a disinterested hummingbird. The English language just isn’t equipped for what we’re trying to do here. 

Finlay McWalter

Irn Bru: They Shouldn’t Have Sent A Poet.

But we’re not quitters, so here goes. Basically, imagine one of those experiments where someone leaves a penny in a glass of Sprite for a month to see if it dissolves. Now imagine drinking the resulting liquid. Irn-Bru tastes almost exactly like watching some other guy do that. Americans tend to describe it as tasting like bubblegum or cough syrup, but that’s not quite right either. It tastes more like licking your braces after chewing gum for eight hours. It tastes like cough syrup on your heart surgeon’s breath. It’s perhaps the only soft drink in history to be flavored exclusively like itself, suggesting an invention in some sort of time loop.

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If anything, Irn-Bru’s indescribable nature is a point of pride in Scotland. We’re talking about a brand that for years advertised itself as flavored like a bridge strut. Social media users have proudly described it as tasting like a “rusty nail watered by the tears of Scottish children” and “a bubbling highland stream mixed with casual violence.” We’d describe it more like discovering the world’s last can of Fanta 30 years after the apocalypse. It tastes like finding a loose rivet in your pack of jawbreakers and powering through it anyway. It tastes like dental tools, if the dentist was a double agent for Big Cavity. It tastes like being beaten by a Candy Kingdom loan shark. It tastes like Scotland. It tastes great.