'English soft drinks' and the story of Spain's first bubbles

The more the sun shines, the more thirsty you get. It doesn't matter that the media, so intent lately on pointing out what we've been doing wrong all our lives, insist every summer that warm or room-temperature drinks provide more effective hydration than cold ones. We don't care that ice-cold drinks trick our brains and even though we know for a fact that plain H2O is the best soft drink ever invented, we will never shy away from other options.

However much we are now told that the relief they produce is a false perception, human beings have always tried to combat the heat with cold drinks. Cooling recipes have been a trend throughout history: inventing ingenious things like the botijo, along with aloja, hipocrás, horchatas, sarsaparilla and barley water. Now our attention turns to fizzy drinks, an invention that is considered almost evil nowadays but at the end of the 19th century, it was all the rage in a Spain that had only seen bubbles in champagne... from afar.

That bubbling passion began in 1767 by English chemist Joseph Priestley, who developed a method of infusing water with carbon dioxide. Priestley's formula was perfected by a German gentleman whose surname will no doubt ring a bell: Johann Jacob Schweppe, who improved the industrial production of artificially carbonated water and in 1783 founded Schweppes. Nine years later, he moved the business to London, where his sparkling water was a huge success and flavoured versions were developed by mixing with concentrated syrups. It was believed that the carbonic acid - which arose from the reaction between water and carbon dioxide - was very beneficial for digestion and also helped many other processes in the human body, so these 'English soft drinks' (later rebranded as American) began to be sold in chemists' shops. It is worth remembering that pharmacies were not always the specialised shops we know today, and that they produced and sold master remedies ranging from cosmetics to sweets and tonic wines.

Almost everyone knows that Coca-Cola was invented by American pharmacist John Pemberton in 1886, but not that in Spain he had colleagues who devoted their lives to bubbles. One of them was Jaime García-Herranz y Sánchez (1848-1899), founder of the company Espumosos Herranz with branches in Madrid, Valencia, Alicante and Barcelona; another was Quirino de Pinedo y Basarte (1845-1911), a pharmacist from Bilbao who in 1886 won a gold medal for his soft drinks at the international food exhibition in Paris and we must not forget Agustín Trigo Mezquita (1863-1952), creator of the legendary Trinaranjus.

All of them were based on the model of US drugstores, shops that sold medicines, cosmetics, tobacco, stamps, liquor and a bit of everything, including fizzy drinks. The mixture of carbonated water and concentrated syrup was sold in returnable siphons or bottles or consumed on the spot, served through taps. The first soda fountains in Spain opened in the mid-1880s with tremendous success due largely to their novelty. In 1888, for example, a newspaper article stated that "most consumers do not like [fizzy drinks], but as it is a new thing they will drink them standing up and pay for them with pleasure, even if they make their throats itch and their noses tickle". The pioneering shop in Madrid, run by José Bermúdez de Castro, was literally called 'Refrescos Ingleses' (English soft drinks) and from its opening in 1886 it was so successful that in a few months it already had three establishments. In June 1887, women's magazine El Siglo declared that the famous soft drinks were, at least in Madrid, within the reach of everyone. What had started out as a luxury item had now become cheap enough to be enjoyed "by countesses and chulapas" (Madrid's working-class).

Bubbles were modern, trendy and healthy. If we are to believe an advertising brochure published at the end of the 19th century by Espumosos Herranz, fizzy drinks were promoted as a cure-all that nourished, refreshed, quenched thirst, aided digestion, prevented eruptive and septic diseases and produced a "slightly anaesthetic effect and a very pleasant state of passing intoxication with a propensity to sleep". And the flavours? Brace yourselves, because some of them will seem unfamiliar or terribly old-fashioned. Back then there were lemon, orange, redcurrant, cherry, strawberry and pineapple soft drinks, but also others that the modern palate has forgotten, such as mint, grog (rum, sugar, spices and citrus), mazagran (coffee with lemon and liqueur), quince, vanilla and agraz (juice of green or unripe grapes). Take a long sip of your favourite, because the history of soft drinks will be with us for weeks to come.