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The Bluegrass Heritage Museum is hosting a traveling Smithsonian exhibit during August that focuses on rural innovation and contains an ode to a Clark County legend: Ale-8-One.

Museum Director Sandy Stults discussed why the company is included in the exhibit.

“We are lucky to have Ale-8. It is the state soft drink,” Stults said, adding that the company fit the criteria for a local product that excelled in business innovation.

And as it approaches its 100th anniversary in 2026, Ale-8 continues to be on the cusp of innovation and has been since its inception during the Roaring 20s.

Sheila Frye, Ale-8’s business development manager, touched on this fact during a recent talk at the grand opening of the Spark! Places of Innovation.

“George Lee Wainscott, or Uncle Lee as we call him at the office, he seemed to be way ahead of his time,” Frye said. “He was very ambitious.”

Wainscott was born in Clark County in 1867 and graduated from Transylvania University. According to company legend, his interest in carbonated beverages began down by the railroad tracks.

“He saw a man, supposedly this is the story that we have been told, down at the depot he saw a carbonation machine and he was truly fascinated by it,” Frye said.

By 1902 Wainscott had concocted his own flavored drinks and distilled water and by 1906 he had developed a formula for what later became known as Roxa-Kola, which was named after his wife, Roxanne.

The soft drink became so successful that a particular Georgia-based beverage manufacturer took notice.

“Coca-Cola came knocking and said, ‘We are suing you,’” Frye said.

Fortunately for Wainscott – and generations of future Kentuckians – he prevailed in the lawsuit thanks to crucial evidence that was ironically from Coke.

“The reason that he won we because he actually had a letter from Coca-Cola talking about their partnership and helping each other. Because of that piece of paper he won in Fayette County and the appeal in Cincinnati,” Frye said.

To avoid another lawsuit, Wainscott decided to develop another recipe that would be vastly different from Coke’s signature dark brown liquid.

Again according to company lore, Wainscott traveled to Europe after World War I and encountered ginger beer, a non-alcoholic drink made from fermented ginger root.

The idea of using ginger and citrus in a soda formula appealed to Wainscott, so he got to work, but the first recipe did not satisfy him. Recipe number two was just right, however.

“That is what we still use today,” Frye said.

Armed with what he believed to be a superior product, Wainscott still had a problem; he didn’t have a name.

So, he went to the public seeking assistance at the 1926 Clark County Fair.

“We don’t know her name, but a young girl said, ‘How about A Late One’, because it was the latest and greatest thing,” Frye said.

The name stuck and was later shortened to the one that graces the company logo today.

The company still uses the same formula that Wainscott developed close to a century ago and produced it solely for most of its history.

That changed in the early 2000s when the Diet and Ale-8 Zero Sugar were launched.

The arrival of Ellen McGeeney as president in 2013 changed the company’s direction.

“She has been responsible for us getting Ale-8 out into different areas,” Frye said.

The expansion also beget a slew of new flavors such as orange cream, cherry, blackberry and peach.

Daphne Phipps is the company’s director of product excellence and innovations and spearheads the effort to develop the new flavors – blackberry and peach were her babies.

Phipps shared a behind-the-scenes look at developing the new flavors.

“It is a tedious process that we go through,” she said. “We look through sales reports to come up with the next flavor that we are going to come out with.”

The company pays attention to market trends and will go straight to the consumer for feedback.

“For instance, for peach, we did a survey at a couple of stores and asked what flavor they wanted us to come out with,” Phipps said. “The top answer was peach, and so we said, ‘Well, we are going to have to make a peach now.’”

Once the flavor is decided on, the company enlists the help of a sensory panel that is trained to taste the product.

“They have to know what each individual component in Ale-8 tastes like,” Phipps said. “There are some things that are not pleasant to taste alone, but we have to do so we can do our job.”

The product development phase is very much trial and error.

“There are several steps we go through,” Phipps said. “I will create a product in my lab that they built for me, and I will bring it to the product development team, and they will take the product and collect feedback on likes and dislikes. At that point, I will get back to the lab and come up with the next formula, and we will all taste that together until we get a product that we all love.”

And to prove how fastidious the development product is, Phipps said that the company’s latest creation has gone through 53 formula recipes and two canceled launches over the last year and a half, with the company hoping to launch it soon.

Do not look for the Ale-8 to slow down the innovation train in the future, either.

“Innovations has become so important to us because we want to be around another 100 years, and innovation helps support that,” Phipps said.