What makes pink lemonade pink?

Ew, gross, no. Sometimes it is done with grenadine, but generally it is just dye I believe.

@EmpressPixie beat me to it. But I’m actually more interested in the stories behind it.

Story 1 of its history follows as thus:
“At 15 he [Henry E. “Sanchez” Allott] ran away with a circus and obtained the lemonade concession. One day while mixing a tub of the orthodox yellow kind he dropped some red cinnamon candies in by mistake. The resulting rose-tinted mixture sold so surprisingly well that he continued to dispense his chance discovery.”

Story 2 is even better:
“Pete Conklin… first invented the drink in 1857 when he used water dyed pink from a horse rider’s red tights to make his lemonade.”

That’s perhaps even worse than bugs…

Red #40 is what makes Minute Maid Pink Lemonade pink. It’s a synthetic color, not bug-based.

What you are referring to is carmine, or carminic acid. It’s a red coloring used in foods (quite common in yogurts). Carmine comes from these little red beetles from South America that are either boiled or crushed (can’t remember which it is). I’ve never seen it used as a food color in lemonade though. Everyone knows the red in pink lemonade comes from lemon blood.

If the pink doesn’t have flavor, why do we put it in?

@SirBailey Same reason they make cheddar orange. :)

I know why pink lemonade is pink! “The Bartender is having prostate problems!!!”

[think about it].

@fireinthepriory , but we CHOOSE pink lemonade or regular. Chedder is always orange, no? Or do we ask specifically for orange chedder?

@SirBailey Cheddar can be orange or white, identical except for some food coloring in the orange variety. I always buy white cheddar since I figure I don’t need to be ingesting more food coloring than I already am. :) (I heard somewhere it was originally so you knew which came from Wisconsin and which was from Vermont?)

@fireinthepriory , interesting. I don’t like cheddar so I didn’t know that.

The original guy made it pink because he disovered folks would buy something that was “new and different,” something most advertising agencies still rely upon today. New! Improved!

Commercial pink lemonade is dyed pink with food coloring, but you can make it at home by adding a bit of grenadine or some strawberry or raspberry juice.

And the “bugs” are Cochineal bugs, a scale insect in the suborder Sternorrhyncha, from which the crimson-colored dye, carmine, is derived, and it is native to tropical north and South America. If you see prickley pear cactus pads with clumps of white fluff on them, that is the cochineal insect. The Spanish explorers and treasure-seekers prized the bugs because they could get huge bucks for shipping them to Europe to make red dye.

Also known as “cochineal extract”, “carmine”, “crimson lake”, “natural red 4”, “C.I. 75470”, “E120”, or even “natural colouring”, bug-based dyes are not toxic or carcinogenic. However a very few folks are allergic to it, suffering asthma, atrial fibrillation, or anaphylactic shock if exposed.

And yes, it might be used in pink lemonade. According to Wikipedia,

“The water-soluble form is used in alcoholic drinks with calcium carmine; the insoluble form is used in a wide variety of products. Together with ammonium carmine they can be found in meat, sausages, processed poultry products (meat products cannot be coloured in the United States unless they are labeled as such), surimi, marinades, alcoholic drinks, bakery products and toppings, cookies, desserts, icings, pie fillings, jams, preserves, gelatin desserts, juice beverages, varieties of cheddar cheese and other dairy products, sauces, and sweets. The average human consumes one to two drops of carminic acid each year with food.”

In other words, if you want to avoid consuming it, never eat red food except for tomatoes from your own garden.

I think I’ll go pour myself a nice tall glass of lemon blood.

Good day.

I always just thought it was a bit of strawberry flavor or grenadine. Pink lemonade seems sweeter than regular, and I just thought that was why. That could just be psychological.

When we make it at home, we add cranberry juice.

@ubersiren I always thought that the pink lemonade tasted sweeter too

When I make it at home I add pink grapefruit juice to the lemonade. Yum.

i add lime juice (and water) to orange juice. Tastes sweeter to me that way. Limes are definitely sweeter than lemons, to my taste.