Beverage Trivia
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This beverage trivia quiz has 169 free questions with answers and covers the whole drinks cabinet, not just the bar. There are 169 questions on soft drinks (why Fanta exists, what 7 Up once claimed to contain, which soda is older than Coca-Cola), coffee and espresso, tea from the Boston Harbor to bubble tea, energy and sports drinks, bottled water, hot chocolate, kombucha and a round of world drinks like yerba mate, horchata, lassi, kvass and ayran. Beer, wine, spirits and cocktails get a lighter touch here because they have their own quizzes on BrainPickle, but you will still meet the oldest sparkling wine, the 9,000-year Guinness lease, the Gibson and the Red Snapper. It is built for pub quiz hosts, trivia-night organisers and anyone who has ever argued about where mountain dew got its name. Every answer was checked against a primary source, mostly the relevant Wikipedia article or the brand's own history, and the difficulty runs from easy warm-ups to a handful of questions that will stump most food and drink experts.
30 of 169 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city did pharmacist John Pemberton first sell his new temperance soda in 1886?
Atlanta
Atlanta's Jacobs Pharmacy poured the first glass in 1886, after the city voted to go dry and Pemberton reworked his coca wine tonic into an alcohol-free syrup.
Q 02What nickname stuck to the sweeter Coca-Cola formula that sparked protests in 1985?
New Coke
New Coke beat both the old recipe and Pepsi in taste tests, yet the outcry was so loud that the original came back that July as Coca-Cola Classic.
Q 03Which figure starred in White Rock ginger ale adverts in 1923, years before the Coca-Cola campaign often credited with shaping his look?
Santa Claus
Santa Claus was selling White Rock mineral water by 1915 and its ginger ale by 1923, so Coca-Cola's famous 1930s adverts did not invent the jolly man in red.
Q 04Under what name was Pepsi first sold in 1893 at a North Carolina drugstore?
Brad's Drink
Brad's Drink was named for its creator, pharmacist Caleb Bradham, who rechristened it Pepsi-Cola in 1898 and lost the company in 1923 after betting heavily on sugar prices.
Q 05Pepsi got its 1898 name from a supposed benefit for which bodily function?
Digestion
Digestion was the pitch: the name probably comes from pepsin, a digestive enzyme, and early adverts promised relief from indigestion, headaches and drowsiness.
Q 06Charles Alderton created Dr Pepper at a drugstore soda fountain in which Texas city?
Waco
Regulars simply ordered 'a Waco'. The name Dr Pepper was in commercial use by 1885, a year before Coca-Cola.
Q 07A long-running rumour claims Dr Pepper secretly contains which ingredient?
Prune juice
Prune juice has never been in the recipe, the company insists; nobody knows who started the rumour, though theories blame a rival's deliveryman or a Bob Hope remark.
Q 08Which word, hinting at a mood-lifting mineral, came before 'Lemon Soda' in 7 Up's early-1930s name?
Lithiated
Lithiated meant the soda claimed lithium citrate, a mood-stabilising compound sold in many tonics of the day; the word had gone from the name within a few years.
Q 09Fanta was created in 1940 in which country, after a trade embargo cut off supplies of Coca-Cola syrup?
Germany
Max Keith of Coca-Cola Deutschland created Fanta in Germany in 1940 from whey and apple pomace; the name came from 'Fantasie' after staff were told to use their imagination.
Q 10Before it was a soda, 'mountain dew' was 19th-century slang for which drink?
Whiskey
'Mountain dew' meant moonshine whiskey; the Hartman brothers of Knoxville, Tennessee, first sold the soda in the 1940s as a whiskey mixer, with a hillbilly label showing a barefoot mountaineer and a rifle.
Q 11Root beer's traditional flavour comes from the root bark of which tree?
Sassafras
Sassafras root bark flavoured root beer until 1960, when the FDA banned its aromatic oil, safrole, over cancer fears; most makers switched to a safrole-free extract.
Q 12The word 'cola' comes from the caffeine-rich seed of which plant?
Kola
Kola nuts, chewed as a stimulant across West Africa, flavoured the first colas and gave them their name, though most modern brands get their caffeine elsewhere.
Q 13Which country is home to the bright orange soft drink Irn-Bru?
Scotland
Scotland's A.G. Barr launched it in 1901 as Iron Brew; the spelling became Irn-Bru in the 1940s, when new labelling rules demanded names be literally true and the drink was not brewed.
Q 21Black, green, oolong and white tea all come from the leaves of which single plant species?
Camellia sinensis
Camellia sinensis makes every true tea: the difference lies in processing, with leaves left to wither and oxidise longer to go from green through oolong to black.
Q 22Grenadine, the red cocktail syrup, was traditionally made from the juice of which fruit?
Pomegranate
Pomegranate is 'grenade' in French, which gave grenadine its name, though most modern brands are made from artificial flavourings instead.
Q 23Which country, known for tulip-shaped tea glasses, drank the most tea per person in the 2010s?
Turkey
Turkey drank about 3 kg of tea a head each year, ahead of Ireland; the habit is barely a century old, encouraged after the First World War made coffee scarce and costly.
Q 14Ginger ale was first made in the 1850s by apothecary Thomas Cantrell in which Irish city?
Belfast
Belfast's Thomas Cantrell is credited with the first ginger ale, a dark golden style; the paler kind that swept North America was created in Toronto about fifty years later.
Q 15Where is Kaldi, the goatherd credited in legend with discovering coffee, usually said to have lived?
Ethiopia
Ethiopia is where the legend has Kaldi's goats too lively to sleep after eating coffee cherries; in most tellings he took the fruit to a monastery, and the monks spread the word.
Q 16The earliest credible reports of coffee drinking come from 15th-century Sufis in which land, home of the port of Mocha?
Yemen
Yemen's Sufis drank coffee to stay alert through night-time devotions, and until about 1700 nearly all the world's supply was still grown there.
Q 17Which country grew about 31% of the world's coffee beans in 2023, more than any other?
Brazil
Brazil's first coffee seedlings, legend says, were smuggled out of French Guiana in 1727 hidden in a bouquet from the governor's wife; by the 1840s it led the world.
Q 18Luigi Bezzera, who patented an improved espresso machine in 1901, worked in which Italian city?
Milan
Milan's Luigi Bezzera built a machine that brewed coffee to order in seconds; Desiderio Pavoni bought his patents in 1903 and the pair unveiled it at the 1906 Milan Fair.
Q 19Starbucks takes its name from the chief mate in which novel?
Moby-Dick
Starbuck is the first mate of the Pequod in Moby-Dick; co-founder Gordon Bowker admitted the novel had little to do with the business, as partner Terry Heckler just thought words beginning with 'st' sounded powerful.
Q 20Starbucks opened its first store in 1971 in which city?
Seattle
Seattle's first Starbucks opened in 1971 near Pike Place Market as a shop for coffee beans and brewing gear, a model its founders borrowed from Berkeley roaster Alfred Peet.
Q 24The tea dumped into Boston Harbor in December 1773 belonged to which company?
East India Company
The East India Company was stuck with 17 million pounds of unsold tea, so Parliament's Tea Act let it ship straight to America, and the colonists revolted.
Q 25Some of the men who dumped the tea in Boston Harbor dressed up as which people?
Mohawk warriors
Mohawk warriors were the disguise of choice because destroying the tea was a crime: the raiders hid their faces before boarding the three ships.
Q 26Masala chai takes its name from 'masala', a Hindi word for a blend of what?
Spices
Spices such as cardamom and ginger are the masala; the drink took shape when railway-station tea sellers began loading their brew with milk and sugar.
Q 27Matcha's vivid green colour and umami come from doing what to the tea bushes before harvest?
Shading them from the sun
Shading them from the sun for the last weeks before harvest boosts chlorophyll and the savoury amino acid theanine; the leaves are then ground, so you drink them whole.
Q 28Where did bubble tea, with its chewy tapioca pearls, originate in the 1980s?
Taiwan
Taiwan has two rival claimants: a Tainan tea-shop owner who says he added tapioca balls in 1986, and a Taichung tea house that dates its version to 1988.
Q 29Which country is the world's largest producer of milk, ahead of the United States?
India
India makes more than a fifth of the world's milk, thanks largely to Operation Flood, the co-operative dairy programme launched in 1970 that turned a milk-short country into the top producer.
Q 30Kopi luwak, one of the world's most expensive coffees, is made from beans that have passed through which animal?
Civet
Civets eat ripe coffee cherries and pass the beans whole; the high price has led to wild civets being caged on plantations, a practice animal-welfare researchers condemn.