A few years ago I first read your blog about the questionable safety of ingesting one of the discontinued Pine Brothers brand cough drop.

Recently, I was having a conversation with a younger friend who never experienced those great-tasting delectables, and thought I’d check the Web again for any new information, then found this You Tube video of your acquaintance sampling the PB fossil you sent him.

I also doiscovered a link to a website at PineBrothers Dot-com, claiming to sell the fondly-remembered brand once again. Have you tried that source or know of anyone who has, and if it is legitimate?

I, too, loved the old PB cough drops, both cherry and honey varieties, but especially the cherry-flavored drops. Like some others, I also vaguely remember there might have been other flavor varieties of Pine Brothers at one time, but certainly cherry and honey were the longest manufactured.

I first recall dissolving a PB drop in my mouth in the early 1960s, so these false claims on the Internet, touting the brand as a “1980s” product, are just nonsense. I think this boast just evolved from a person (whose youth was in the 1980s) remembering her/his first experiences with Pine Brothers and the misinformation was perpetuated. But as posts here clearly demonstrate, others remember the product from the 1960s and ’70s, as do I. I suspect the brand was at least first produced in the early 1960s, possibly even earlier.

Do you know which company was the original manufacturer of Pine Brothers, and the location of the company? Did one company manufacturer the product for its entire existence (not counting the revived attempts)?

It is too bad there is no information about Pine Brothers cough drops on Wikipedia. I seem to recall once reading that (despite a claim that once appeared on the PB packaging) the product never contained any actual medication, and that there were never any actual Pine Brothers, just a fictitious concoction conjured up to rival Smith Brothers’ brand.

Do you or anyone else know the whole story about Pine Brothers?

They are Dr. Doolittle’s Apothecary Pastilles (est. 1922 and still around!), soft, fruit drops that come in different flavors. Real similar to our beloved Pine Bros.

You can get them at Cost Plus World Markets. I’m loving ‘em!

“eat it…suck on it,not chew it….if it was just rank as hell when i put it in my mouth, the best thing at that point for anyone,would be to spit it out ,right?”