A SPIRIT IS RESURRECTED
Century-old Cronk is all the rage after a tweet
A near 140-year-old advertisement from the Calgary Herald has gone viral and resulted in the resurrection of Cronk, a 19th-century sarsaparilla-based drink. And it all started with a tweet.
University of Calgary researcher Paul Fairie often tweets out images of the quirky things he finds in old newspapers. He started doing it when he was researching a project five years ago; now, he mainly does it for fun.
So, when he found teasing ads — simple sentences like “Cronk is the drink,” “Cronk is good,” “Buy Cronk,” or just “Cronk” — embedded in between stories in an 1883 edition of the Calgary Herald, he tweeted out some pictures on June 21 and thought people would like it and that would be the end of it.
Cronk started trending. “I thought that people would like the tweet,” said Fairie, who has more than 14,000 Twitter followers.
Over 11,000 retweets and 1.4 million views of the tweet later, Fairie has been interviewed by The Guardian and CBC’S As It Happens, while local brewery Cold Garden is trying its hand at brewing a batch. Cold Garden head brewer Blake Belding told the Guardian that he’s been getting orders from the U.S. and the U.K. and that it should be ready in two weeks.
“It seems like three drinks at once,” Fairie said. “I don’t know how that will go. The main ingredients are root beer; there’s a gingery, cinnamony-beer that you can imagine; and then there’s the green tea, that will make it like a kombucha, I guess if there’s yeast as well.”
Since the tweet trended, Fairie has had some time to think about why people love Cronk. “The word itself is great,” he said. “Cronk is a funny word to look at and say. The amazing ads. I’ve found some other ads for Cronk in the meantime and they’re more detailed, maybe more helpful if you want to know what it is, but they’re not as good.”
Fairie initially joined Twitter “in 2009 literally just to get Calgary Transit updates on my phone,” he said. “I didn’t really tweet for four years.”
Now, he’s resurrected a century-old drink and he’s looking forward to trying some when Cold Garden finishes its first brew of Cronk.
“It’ll taste rooty and warm,” Fairie said. “I hope it’s at least not boring. I hope it’s either really amazing or a little bit terrible.”