But today I wish to talk about a different bright orange entity: the infamous Scottish fizzy drink Irn-Bru.
Last July, I penned a column on whisky. A few months before that, I devoted a whole article to another beverage beloved of the Scots, Buckfast Tonic Wine. Irn-Bru is the final member of this unholy trinity.
It’s impossible to describe the taste of Irn-Bru in mere words, but I’ll give it a shot. It’s bold, fizzy and fiercely sweet. It tastes as radioactive as it looks — like rust, bubblegum and ginger. My friends describe it as tasting of "rusty nails", "sunburn" and "like licking a battery".
Irn-Bru’s tagline is "made in Scotland from girders". While this isn’t just a nod to the resilience of its devoted drinkers, there’s a grain of truth to it — well, more like 0.002% of an additive. Irn-Bru contains a dash of ammonium ferric citrate, meaning it does, in fact, have a teensy bit of iron in it.
Irn-Bru is certainly something of an acquired taste — one I have not admittedly fully acquired myself. Try as I might, I can only stomach a few mouthfuls of the stuff before I start to feel somewhat queasy. I am only half Scottish, after all.
Irn-Bru was created in 1901 by AG Barr, a family-run business in Falkirk. It was originally marketed as "Iron Brew", a health tonic with energy-boosting properties, made from a secret recipe containing 32 flavours. (The receipt for Irn-Bru is still a closely-guarded secret; only three people in the whole world reportedly have it — former company chairman Robin Barr; his daughter Julie Barr and one other AG Barr board director, whose identity remains confidential).
According to legend, steel workers at the time were busy rebuilding Glasgow Central Station and were apparently drinking too much beer in a bid to combat the heat and quench their thirst. Enter Iron Brew, an invigorating, tonic-style beverage, providing weary workers with a much-needed pick-me-up.
"Iron Brew" became "Irn-Bru" in 1947, after government regulations decreed that brand names should be "literally true". While Irn-Bru did (and still does) contain trace amounts of iron, it wasn’t actually "brewed". The drink was thus phonetically renamed Irn-Bru, which, if you ask me, sounds much cooler anyway. "Proper spelling is for nerds anyway," as their website states.
In 2018, catastrophe struck when AG Barr announced that it was halving the sugar content of Irn-Bru in order to dodge the UK’s sugar tax — a move that threatened its reputation as Scotland’s favourite hangover cure. This announcement sparked a nationwide stockpiling spree reminiscent of Marmageddon, with die-hard drinkers hoarding cans, crossing the border to England for full-sugar supplies, and even selling cans of the original formula online for extortionate sums.
Allegedly, one Dundee bar held an Irn-Bru "funeral" to mourn the last of its pre-tax stash. AG Barr insists the reformulated version keeps the same iconic taste, but depending on who you ask, that jury’s still out.
Over the past 124 years, Irn-Bru’s legendary advertisements have charmed, horrified, and tickled the sensitivities of Scots by equal measures. Laid out like a Tui ad, one memorable billboard featured a cow next to the phrase "When I’m a burger, I want to be washed down with Irn-Bru".
Another advertisement depicted a beautiful young woman in a bikini holding a can and saying: "I never knew four and a-half inches could give so much pleasure." Yet another TV advertisement showed a grandma on a mobility scooter ram-raiding a supermarket for her weekly stock of Irn-Bru.
For many Scots, Christmas doesn’t begin until the Irn-Bru Snowman takes flight. First aired in 2006, Irn-Bru’s first-ever Christmas TV commercial put a new spin on Raymond Briggs’ beloved 1982 animation, The Snowman. Set to a reimagined version of Howard Blake’s Walking in the Air, the ad follows the boy and his frosty companion soaring over Scotland’s gorgeous landmarks — only for the Snowman to swipe the Irn-Bru and leave the boy tumbling.
From the very start, Irn-Bru’s success was due in great part to its pure "Scottishness". Adam Brown, a famous highland athlete from Shotts, featured on the original label design (because nothing says refreshment like a guy who can toss a caber).
Irn-Bru’s distinctive colour also recalls Scotland’s abundance of redheads. An ad campaign from 2019, "Ginger and Proud" paid homage to the gingers, taking a stand for redheads the nation over.
Billy Connolly once penned a song thanking the Barrs "for saving my life on so many Sunday mornings" in his 1975 album Cop Yer Whack For This.
Irn-Bru even has its own tartan — a gorgeous bright blue and orange pattern reminiscent of the ubiquitous packaging. (I’ve yet to see anyone wear it though).
Irn-Bru has been the top-selling soft drink in Scotland for over a century, kicking global competitors like Pepsi, Fanta and Coca-Cola to the kerb. With about 20 cans of Irn Bru sold every second, it’s safe to say this neon-orange drink isn’t going away any time soon.
I’ve recently made the slightly incredible decision to return to my university studies, finishing off a thesis I abandoned three years ago.
Now that I’ve hit 30 I’ve noticed that too many cups of coffee tend to set my heart racing and my hands shaking. There’s only 30mg of caffeine in a 330ml can of Irn-bru. A mug of tea, on the other hand, contains about 75mg of caffeine, and a mug of coffee provides about 100mg of caffeine.
Perhaps I should follow in the footsteps of so many Scots before me and properly embrace this drink — anything to get the dissertation done.
• Jean Balchin is an ODT columnist who has started a new life in Edinburgh.
