 | The story of Mawsons Sarsaparilla begins in 1933,when milkman Joe Mawson came to Oldham and bought a herbalist shop. The back room of his shop with its piano, card tables and home-brewed beer was soon a popular meeting place for local people. Joe brewed up to forty gallons a day of the non-alcoholic beer in the cellar of the shop. A mixture of more than twenty herbs was boiled for forty minutes before being left to cool with a slice of yeast-covered toast floating on surface. The concoction was then worked for twenty-four hours, casked and kept for twelve hours more before being ready to serve. Joe charged 4d a pint. |
Suppliers to Joe came partly from J.Nichols & Co, who kept many temperance bars stocked up with loose herbs, herbal tablets and concentrates for making herbal drinks. These concentrates included gingerette, lime, cream soda Vimto - and Sarsaparilla. Joe had a son named ... Joe and he devised many an unusual cocktail of different concentrates, including a mixture of raspberry, lime, cream soda and other closely guarded flavours which he dubbed the "Zombie". This was a favourite with the young but its popularity did not match that of sarsaparilla, His best-selling drink, which was taken diluted with plain water, herb beer or in the later years, with soda water.
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When Joe first opened, there were thirty-six herbalists and of which twenty were temperance bars in Oldham, but over the years the numbers dwindled and in 1963 last orders was called for the final time. This was also the year in which, the fourth of his five children, was born. Growing up in the shop, Nigel was constantly reminded of the days in which drinks had been served in the back room and even thirty years later customers would ask for a glass of sarsaparilla or even enquire whether anyone still made it. | . This continued interest prompted us to bring back the herb beer and sarsaparilla to commemorate our 65th anniversary in 1998. This was no easy task - all that remained of the old system was a clutch of the old recipes granddad had originally hand written for the herb beer and no recipe for the sarsaparilla. It took many months and much technical help from J.Nichols & Co before we finally managed to reproduce the sarsaparilla in a cordial form, made to the original recipe but in a modern, clinical environment. The herb beer was brewed by a microbrewery and for two weeks in August 1998 we gave samples to many old and new customers in our Oldham shop. Our first batch five thousand bottles of Sarsaparilla made, sold out in just eight weeks.
In response to this demand and spurred on by the encouragement of local customers, Nigel and Joe set up a separate company manufacturing and distributing the drink throughout the country. Mawsons Sarsaparilla Cordial can now be found in over three hundred outlets throughout Britain. |
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New Products For August |
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