Krating Daeng

Krating Daeng is a still, sweet, golden tonic drink sold in a small amber glass bottle of 150 millilitres. The squat bottle has a short neck and a blue screw cap, and its blue paper label shows two red gaur, the wild cattle of Southeast Asia, charging at each other before a yellow sun. Inside are sugar, caffeine, taurine, inositol and B vitamins, meant to be drunk in one go, and it is not carbonated.

The drink was devised by Chaleo Yoovidhya, a former medicine salesman who had founded T.C. Pharmaceutical in Bangkok in 1956. English Wikipedia and the South China Morning Post date its introduction to 1976. The maker records that it began as a 100cc syrup under the two-bull mark, which buyers nicknamed 'Red Bull', and that the 150cc drink followed; Thai Wikipedia dates that bottle to 1981, so the year is disputed.

Chaleo sold it first to rural labourers, lorry drivers and shift workers rather than to city shoppers. Advertisements of the 1970s urge drinkers to mix it into rice spirit to spare the liver, and show labourers drinking it from tumblers. The company later sponsored Thai boxing, and the charging gaur became familiar at ringside. An export company followed in 1978, beginning with Singapore.

In the early 1980s the Austrian marketer Dietrich Mateschitz found that the drink eased his jet lag. With Chaleo he founded Red Bull GmbH, and in 1987 they launched a carbonated version in a slim can for European tastes. That is the drink most of the world knows; the Thai original carried on beside it, still and in glass. Chaleo's TCP Group still sells Krating Daeng Classic throughout Thailand, now labelled with 1,000 milligrams of taurine. Its domestic lead has passed to rivals, and in Britain it is sold by online importers in packs of six.