Vincent's Beverages and Sunset Beverages, Lewiston, Maine

From the archives of The Soda Fizz, a 2003 article on Vincent's Beverages and Sunset Beverages—both bottled in Lewiston.

There were bad times too, when a fire did serious damage to the plant in November of 1951. But the infamous disaster was the wire-brush incident in November, 1952, when Irene Lajoie drank a bottle of Sunset Ginger Ale and claimed she became ill because there was a rusty wire brush in the bottle. She and her husband sued, and the press picked up the story.

Although Gerry Bilodeau explained convincingly that a brush in a bottle was impossible and the jury awarded the Lajoies only a fraction of what they had asked, the result was still not exactly the sort of publicity a small business wants or needs.