Bacchus-D

Bacchus-D is a small tonic drink in a squat brown glass bottle holding 100 ml, closed with a white screw cap and wrapped in a blue label on which the name sits in red Korean letters inside a white, cog-edged oval. The liquid is a clear yellow with a distinctive smell. Its maker lists taurine, inositol, nicotinamide, three B vitamins and 30 mg of caffeine; it is drunk cold, in a couple of swallows, against tiredness.

It was the idea of Kang Shin-ho, son of Dong-A Pharmaceutical's founder, who returned from medical studies in Freiburg in 1959. He named it after the god of wine, recalling a statue of Bacchus at Hamburg City Hall. The first Bacchus of 1961 was a tablet and the second a glass ampoule; both failed in practice, and in 1963 the formula was put into a 100 ml bottle and called Bacchus-D, the D for drink.

Its advertisements set the tone for half a century. The launch notice in 1963 showed a young worker in a cap drinking from the bottle under the words “Drink vitality!”; the comedian Kim Hee-gap and the actress Nam Mi-ri followed, and from the 1990s campaigns turned to ordinary people, students, mothers, nurses and office workers. Sihn's history counts more than 1.4 million bottles made in 1963 and 76 million in 1970, and in 1967 the one drink made up 13.7 per cent of all the medicines produced in Korea.

The formula has been adjusted several times. In the early 1990s the drink was renamed Bacchus-F, and in 2005 it returned to the name Bacchus-D with twice the taurine. Since 2011 it has been sold outside pharmacies, and a milder Bacchus-F in a larger bottle serves supermarkets and convenience stores. The pharmacy bottle remains 100 ml, as it was in the first advertisement, and Dong-A marked sixty years of the drink in 2023.