NO JOKES!!! Peruvians Do Not Drink WATER, SEE The Yellow Liquid They Drink😲😲 [VIDEO]

Are you wondering what this bright yellow brew is that looks rather like a nuclear liquid than a refreshing beverage? It is actually Peru’s most popular soft drink called Inca Kola. Yes, the most popular, even more so than Coca Cola!

Whether it is delicious may be debatable. Nevertheless, everybody who is visiting Peru should definitely give it a try. And you will have no difficulty in finding it!

The sugar-sweet drink is available pretty much anywhere! From fast-food joints such as McDonald’s or the typical Chifa restaurants to high-class cevicherias and even in Peruvian airlines.

Inca Kola (also known as “the Golden Kola” in international advertising) is a soft drink that was created in Peru in 1935 by British immigrant Joseph Robinson Lindley. The soda has a sweet, fruity flavor that somewhat resembles its main ingredient, lemon verbena (verbena de Indias or cedrón in Spanish).

Americans compare its flavor to bubblegum or cream soda. Sometimes categorized as a champagne cola, it has been described as “an acquired taste” whose “intense color alone is enough to drive away from the uninitiated.

The Coca-Cola Company owns the Inca Kola trademark everywhere but in Peru. In Peru, the Inca Kola trademark is owned by Corporación Inca Kola Perú S.A., which since 1999 is a joint venture between The Coca-Cola Company and the Lindley family, former sole owners of Corporación Inca Kola Perú S.A. and Corporación Lindley S.A.

Peruvians drink Inca Cola instead of water, and there will be three times as many empty Inca bottles as water bottles lying around at any construction site. The soda has a bubblegum flavor that is reminiscent of sessions at the dentist – but Peruvians love it all the same.

More than anything, it is a symbol of national pride and history, a corporate nod to the great Incas. If you don’t care much for the drink, whatever you do, don’t mention it. It’s like insulting their country and will be received with scorn.

In 1999, the Peruvian Press celebrated a decisive victory for their nation over the great avatar of globalized consumerism, Coca-Cola. For decades, the transnational behemoth had tried to become the top-selling soda in Peru. Yet it never managed to surpass a locally beloved brand, Inca Kola.

A brew the Chicago Tribune once described as “radioactive yellow” with “a bubble-gum bouquet,” and which Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges labeled “an implausible drink,” it is one of the only regional sodas Coke never managed to overtake.

So the goliath agreed to partner with Inca Kola rather than compete, buying half of the brand and a third of the shares in the local, family-run business. In an act that some read as surrender, Coke’s then-CEO, M. Douglas Ivester, who reportedly loathed Inca Kola, took a swig in front of snap-happy reporters in Lima.

For many Peruvians, 1999’s victory felt especially sweet because Inca Kola had long served as a rallying point for national pride and identity. Peruvian celebrity chef Hajime Kasuga has gone so far as to declare, “Inca Kola runs through the veins of Peruvian babies.”

More recently Ben Orlove, an anthropologist who studies Peru, attended a Peruvian independence day celebration at the nation’s ambassador’s residence in New York.

At the end of the night, attendees received a tote containing, among other things, a can of Inca Kola. In short, as Tristan Donovan, author of Fizz: How Soda Shook Up The World, puts it, the brand “carries a cultural meaning that goes far beyond the ordinary soda.”

But Inca Kola was never Peru’s only beloved local soda. As Orlove points out, back in the ‘70s and prior, the nation was awash in regional soda brands, many of them with strong local followings.

He has fond memories of Pedrin, a soda produced by a small bottling plant in the highland town of Sicuani. So how did the “improbable” Inca Kola become Peru’s national soda and a successful Coca-Cola competitor?

The classic story runs that, as Charles Walker, a historian who studies Peru, puts it, “on the marketing side, they just nailed it” by constructing a brand that appealed to national pride.

Inca Kola launched out of Lima in 1935, during the 400-year anniversary of the city’s founding. Its unique flavor, its creators stressed, was a secret recipe based in uniquely Andean fruits. (Most suspect it’s anchored on lemon verbena, but the exact flavoring remains mysterious.) And its name and original logo spoke to Peru’s strongly claimed Incan heritage.

“Peruvians’ pride about their Incan ancestry can’t be underestimated,” stresses Keith Lang of the food blog EatPeru. “The grand Inca legacy was something to hold onto in times when the country battled poverty, political instability, and sluggish economic growth.

It meant a great deal for a country whose citizens often feel, or are made to feel, inferior to other countries.”

Since Inca Kola’s launch, its ubiquitous advertising has seeped into every cultural event and institution—“even little school sports teams,” notes Peruvian anthropologist Enrique Mayer. Starting in the ‘60s, company slogans promoted the drink as the national flavor of Peru and called on consumers to patriotically support them against foreign brands.

But this patriotic branding is, according to some academics and cultural critics, problematic. Inca Kola’s visual ads, especially, tend to portray Peruvians as culturally homogenous and exclude darker-skinned individuals, perpetuating racial and class-based biases. And the vigor with which the band dips into the well of nationalism can feel odd when one considers that Inca Kola was created by the Lindleys, an English family that moved to Lima and opened a soft drink company in 1911.

Before launching Inca Kola, they made citrus sodas using syrups imported from the U.K. and received economic support from the British embassy at least once, in 1918, to help them compete against local soda companies.

Still, Lang points out, Peruvians embraced the cola, as the ads “associated [it] with an improved financial situation and a more modern lifestyle,” which many craved. The Lindleys took pains to portray themselves as thoroughly Peruvian, naming their company’s first iteration after a local saint and adopting Spanish diminutives for themselves.

Peruvians are used to people of diverse backgrounds becoming part of national life—recent presidents include a Fujimori and a Kuczynski. And they are seemingly forgiving of things that may seem to outsiders like cultural trespasses or oversteps.

Case in point, few Peruvians seem to harbor ill will towards Coca Cola over its historic (and ongoing) monetization of Andean coca leaves, a crop that the U.S. and international bodies otherwise condemn even when it’s being used for traditional purposes rather than cocaine production.