Vintage 1960s Coach and Four Bitter Lemon 🍋 Soda Label — Stagecoach Silhouette, Philadelphia PA

Who Drank Bitter Lemon? 🍋 Vintage 1960s Coach and Four Bitter Lemon Soda Label, Philadelphia PA

Size: 3 1/2" x 2 1/2"

This label is becoming uncommon now and is very collectible. Really cool stagecoach and colors! Bitter lemon is a grown-up soda, tart and a little bitter, and this Philadelphia label comes with a surprising amount of history packed into three lines of fine print.

🐎 What's on it

A small paper bottle label for Coach and Four Bitter Lemon, black with a bright yellow band. Across the top, COACH AND FOUR ® in cream letters. Through the middle, the yellow band between two thin gold rules, and on it a black silhouette of a coachman driving four horses at full gallop. Then Bitter Lemon in a big white script with a little star at the front, and the fine print, word for word: "Preserved with sodium benzoate. Made with whole lemons and quinine salt. Bottled under authority of Coach and Four Products Co., Phila., Pa., U.S.A. 19140." The back is plain paper. It's New Old Stock, printed and never pasted on a bottle.

👬 The people behind the stagecoach

The name COACH AND FOUR went on soft drinks for the first time on June 26, 1956, and a month later it was filed with the U.S. Patent Office by Sheffield Bottling Co., a Philadelphia partnership doing business as "Coach 'N Four Products Co." It was registered on January 29, 1957 as trademark No. 640,759, for "maltless soft drinks and carbonated waters." That's the little ® on the label. Signing for Sheffield, as a partner, was Harry Labovitz.

On July 11, 1969, Sheffield handed the name and all its goodwill to a new partnership, Coach and Four Products Company, made up of Harry Labovitz and Arthur Labovitz, on North 6th Street in North Philadelphia, ZIP 19140, the very ZIP printed on this label. The trademark was renewed in 1977 and finally lapsed in 1997, forty-one years after that first bottle in 1956.

The 19140 ZIP covers Hunting Park and Nicetown-Tioga, good hard-working North Philadelphia. Nicetown made steel: the works that became Midvale Steel opened there in 1867 making steel wheels for railroad cars, had 11,500 people on the payroll during World War I, and kept the Nicetown plant running until 1976. I like that a lemon soda with a stagecoach on it called that part of town home.

"Bottled under authority of" is franchise talk: the company owned the name and the recipes, and the bottles were filled and capped under its label. The Coach and Four line ran to ginger ale, ginger beer, tonic water, bitter lemon, club soda, sarsaparilla and black raspberry, a full lineup of mixers for a Philadelphia bar or a family's basement fridge. Some of the flavors print this 19140 address and some print 19117, which is Elkins Park just over the city line, so the company printed labels from two addresses over the years.

📅 How old is it?

That ZIP can't be earlier than July 1, 1963, the day ZIP codes began, and the maker's name reads exactly the way the 1969 Labovitz partnership was named. Bitter lemon itself was a young flavor then: Schweppes created its Bitter Lemon in London in 1957. So this is a late 1960s into 1970s label, true vintage Philadelphia soda history.

🍋 Whole lemons and quinine

That line "made with whole lemons and quinine salt" is the whole recipe for bitter lemon in six words. The difference between tonic water and bitter lemon is the lemon, and not just the juice: the peel and the bitter white pith go in too, and the quinine backs up that bitterness. Sour from the juice, bitter from the pith and the quinine, sweet to balance it all out.

The quinine has a long story of its own. It comes from the bark of the cinchona tree. The Spanish learned to use it in the 1600s from the Indigenous peoples of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, and it became the first real treatment for malaria. In early 19th-century India, British officers were told to take their quinine every day, and it was so bitter they mixed it with soda and sugar to get it down. That was tonic water, and bitter lemon is its tart cousin.

🧪 "Preserved with sodium benzoate"

That little disclosure has a big history. In 1902 Harvey Wiley, the chemist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, started feeding food preservatives to a group of young volunteers to see what they did, and the newspapers named them the "Poison Squad." Sodium benzoate was one of the chemicals they swallowed, in gelatin capsules with their meals. Wiley's crusade helped pass the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, and in 1908 the fight over benzoate went to a board of scientists led by Ira Remsen of Johns Hopkins. Sodium benzoate stayed in American sodas, and a label like this one names it right out loud.

🎨 A coach and four

A coach and four is a carriage drawn by four horses, all four driven "four-in-hand" by one driver holding every rein. Philadelphia has the most famous one in American art. Around 1879 to 1880, Fairman Rogers, a Philadelphia engineer and devoted coachman, had Thomas Eakins paint him driving a coaching party through Fairmount Park. The painting, The Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand, hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Eakins posed its horses from Eadweard Muybridge's 1878 photographs of horses in motion, which makes it one of the first paintings to show exactly how horses move. A Philadelphia soda company choosing a coach and four for its label was picking one of the city's own great images.

🏡 Display

Imagine hanging this vintage advertising on your wall as home decor in any room! That black and yellow is sharp in a simple frame, it's right at home behind a bar next to a gin bottle, and it pairs up nicely with the rest of the Coach and Four flavors if you want the whole set together.