couldn’t resist.
Essential oil from the tropical vine koffus sirupus.
Good!
(the other waters of life) 
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/drink/dr-pepper/
Does Dr Pepper contain prune juice?
In a word: NO!
According to the Urban Legends Reference Pages at snopes.com: “It doesn’t, but the rumor is remarkably long-lived, having been with us since about 1930.”
In addition, Bottlecaps (the “Official Newsletter of the Dr Pepper Museum and Free Enterprise Institute”) emphasizes in their Vol. I, 1999, issue: “Prune juice is not and never has been in Dr Pepper. The prune juice rumor is an old story that has been in circulation since the 1930s.”
Also, the Dr Pepper company states on their website that “prune juice is definitely not one of the ingredients.”
And, as if that wasn’t enough, the site for Dr Pepper/Seven Up, Inc. has offered two different assertions during the past two years: 1) “its unique flavor comes from the blending of 23 fruits, none of which are prunes” 2) “Dr Pepper is a unique blend of natural and artificial flavors; it does not contain prune juice.”
The corporation also highlights this “Fun Fact” on its web site: “Contrary to popular misconception, Dr Pepper never has and never will contain prune juice.”
Are we all clear on this now?
Okay, so what’s in Dr Pepper?
On the label in the US, the ingredients are: Carbonated Water; Imperial Pure Cane Sugar [or “High Fructose Corn Syrup and/or Sugar,” if you’re not so lucky]; Caramel Color; Phosphoric Acid; Artificial and Natural Flavors; Sodium Benzoate (Preservative); Caffeine.
[…]
The Dr Pepper company had this to say in a pamphlet it published sometime in either the late 1950’s or early 1960’s: “Its unique flavor results from the blending of pure fruit flavors (gathered from throughout the world) with mystic spices, from far-off Madagascar, and clean, clear distilled sparkling water.” You don’t suppose one of those spices is vanilla, do you? On the company’s web site today, they state the obvious: “It is a blend of many spices and flavor extracts. The color is supplied by caramel especially made for the product.” In addition, the company also says the concentrate for Dr Pepper is kosher, and that “our products which contain High Fructose Corn Syrup may contain small amounts of corn gluten.”
Max W, who “can’t guarantee the accuracy of any of this,” posted this interesting article (with a small caveat) on June 20, 1999:
Yes, I’ve heard the “23 fruit flavors” of Dr. Pepper [sic] for years. I can tell you this is nonsense! I can’t reveal the source (he’d get fired), but here is a list of some of the real flavoring ingredients:
Vanillin (imitation vanilla)
Extract of almond
denatured rum (no joke)
Oil of orange
lactic acid (optional; once listed separately from “flavorings”)
Max goes on to say: “None of this is will be confirmed by the PR people of the company, who reply with the evasive ‘Dr. Pepper contains neither rum nor vanilla.’ Substitutions are possible, depending on the bottler, so that Dr. Pepper in one part of the country might not taste quite the same as in some others. But denatured rum is universal to the formula.” Take it for what it’s worth.
Brian posted to alt.fan.dr-pepper on January 19, 1998 (and emailed me a correction on June 30, 1998), about his visit to the Dublin Dr Pepper plant, which I think definitively answers two questions at once:
“Just got back today from the Dublin bottling plant and museum. There has been a lot of debate on what flavor Dr Pepper really is, so I asked Mr. Kloster [Bill Kloster], the plant owner, who has worked in that plant for almost 60 years. According to him, Dr Pepper is a mix of 23 different fruit flavors. The original creator wanted to create a drink that tasted like the smell of a soda shop. When you walked into a soda shop in that day, you smelled all the fruit flavors of the different sodas all mixed into one. So he basically took a bunch of flavors and mixed them, and came up with Dr Pepper. He said Dr Pepper does not and has never had prune juice in it.”
Alas, Brian may have been one of the last people to ask Bill Kloster that question. Mr. Kloster passed away on September 24, 1999, at age 81, having spent 67 of those years working for the Dublin Dr Pepper plant (minus two years off for service during World War II). His dedication to keeping pure cane sugar in Dr Pepper will be sorely missed.
Is nothing sacred anymore???
I don’t want to know what’s in Dr. Pepper. I have to have it to keep going…
Wasn’t the prune rumour based on the way Dr. Pepper gives most people the trots? 
djm
That only happens when I drink Dr. Pepper to wash down Mexican food.
Seemed to make sense at the time.
…and if it doesn’t have prunes in it
then what is in it that causes the trots?
I’ve always said Dr. Pepper was what we referred to in our little town in the 60s as a “suicide.” If you ordered a suicide the high school girl working at the Arctic Circle would put ice in your cup (either small or large: 15 or 25 cents, as I recall) and then run it under each faucet in the soft drink machine–anything they happened to have: coke, lime, orange, root beer, etc. It was not my cup of tea–and neither is Dr. Pepper.
Susan
Heck…I’d rather drink prune juice, than high fructose corn syrup!
Call me old fashioned, but…ooops…hold on…I’ll be right back…
Susan,
We called them suicides as well. It was a great joy to be able to get them as a child. Don’t think I would like it very much today.
There is a big taste difference between the high fructose and sugar versions of Dr Pepper. The sugar one is much smoother and doesn’t have as much of a bite.
They have the syrup in Dublin, TX and it tastes great on vanilla ice cream. They bottle orange, grape, Big Red, and it seems like something else there with the pure cane sugar. The Big Red is my favorite.
Some people like to drink hot Dr Pepper in the winter months. It gets rave reviews, but I can’t bring myself to try it.
The original idea was to make Dr. Pepper like a “suicide”, that is, a mix of the various soft drink syrups available, however it was found that they didn’t all mix well together, and so some experimentation was undertaken.
As for 23 flavors… that’s what it says on the front of the can.
And the high fructose corn syrup was developed by the chemists at Royal Crown Cola (now owned by Dr. Pepper-7up, which is itself owned by Cadbury-Schweppes) as a less expensive alternative to sugar, which is subject to high tariffs in these United States. Most American bottlers use the corn sweetener. It artificially keeps the corn farmers happy.
Delicious when you don’t think about it.
Gross when you do.
Unhealthy either way.
oh for fecks sake, now I’ve got that hideous jingle in my head…
I’m a pepper, he’s a pepper, she’s a pepper (or whatever) etc
then the closing line
wouldn’t you like to be a pepper too?
BLECHH 
So you think Dr. Pepper is bad?
Ever try this?
KatieBell should know because Dr. Pepper is from the Lone Star State itself. In fact that was the only place you could get it for a long time.
When I lived in Irving as a kid we drank lots of the stuff. $0.19 for a 12 oz bottle. Back in them days they had sugar and not that horrible HFCS.
I’ve heard you can still get it with Sugar in Texas. Is that true KatieBell?
It is true. It is made in the Dublin, TX bottling plant, the oldest Dr Pepper bottling plant. It comes in authentic vintage glass bottles, new 8oz glass bottles, or in aluminum cans. The glass bottles were returned, washed, and reused, but the numbers started dwindling enough to where a person may only take away as many vintage glass bottles as he brought in.
My husband has bought an entire palate full at a time, but right now we only have about 6 or so flats with the vintage glass.
They sell the aluminum cans and small glass bottles in the local grocery stores with a sign in front of them saying “Dublin Dr Pepper!” (Note that there is no period after the Dr)
Dr Pepper bottling plants have geographic territories so that’s why you don’t see it outside of its geographic region very often. It caused a stink with other bottlers when people would buy from TX and re-sell in another bottlers’ territory. I don’t remember what ever came of it, but you can purchase it online I believe.
http://www.dublindrpepper.com/default.aspx
It looks like 2 dozen aluminum cans go for $10 on the web (making them 42 cents a piece) or $16 for the 8oz glass bottles (67 cents a piece). The local farmers’ markets and such sell the bottles for $1.50 to $2 a piece, meaning they are making decent money off of them.
The best time to visit is June when the town has its annual Dr Pepper festival and re-names itself Dr Pepper, TX for a week.
I’ll have to order some of that and some of that North Carolina Ginger Ale we once had a thread about.
Who remembers what that was called?
The bottom line is that Dr. Pepper is kosher.
You can drink it at Pesach.
What’s not to like?
The best soda ever was Dr. Brown’s Cel Ray Tonic,
before it got bought out and artificialized.
Amazing stuff!
It isn’t kosher everywhere.
The concentrate/syrup is certified kosher, but then each bottler has to also go through the certification process for the end product. Only some of the bottlers are certified kosher.
Most soda companies in the US come out with a sugar version of their sodas for Passover because the high fructose corn syrup version is not approved for Passover. The Passover-approved Dr Pepper drops the corn-sugar based caramel and the high fructose corn syrup, using cane sugar for both.
Dublin Dr Pepper says it is kosher, but I don’t believe they are under any further certification. A friend who follows the kosher laws vigilantly would drink the Dublin Dr Pepper, so I would assume most any other people who eat kosher could as well.