Dunoon Goes POP opportunities
Community-inpsired soft drinks
At the POP shop, we love delving into our town’s enterprising heritage. This can lead us down a lot of rabbit holes. And Dunoon’s fascinating soft drinks history is one that inspired our pop-making venture.
Through visiting the amazing Castle House Museum we learned that back in the 1880s, George Stirling started a soft drinks factory in the heart of the town. Behind where the Right Medicine pharmacy is on Argyll Street now. Investigating the story of this thriving business sparked the idea. What if we could resurrect soft drinks production in Dunoon?
Dunoon Goes POP was born.
Doing things differently
Dunoon Goes POP is a soft-drinks start-up that is a little bit different.
We want to bring soft drinks production back to Dunoon in a way that minimises our impact on the planet and maximises our positive impact on the community. We’ll do this by connecting people to the fascinating heritage of soft drinks-making through practical workshops, growing ingredients and gathering local heritage stories.
Thanks to National Lottery players, we have funding from Heritage Lottery Fund and the National Lottery Community Fund and we’re running two Dunoon Goes POP projects to help us work towards a socially enterprising approach to local soft drinks production.. And, we’re looking for local people to get involved.
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How can I get involved?
150-bottles of pop with Dunoon Burgh Hall
We thought that mixing heritage stories, rhubarb growing and pop-making would be the perfect recipe for Dunoon Goes POP to celebrate 150 years of Dunoon Burgh Hall.
To do this we’re making 150 bottles of a rhubarb-flavoured commemorative pop, a drink that celebrates the Hall’s architect Robert Bryden. You can get involved by:
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providing us with some rhubarb
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attending a heritage story workshop
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helping us to make 150 bottles of pop.
As and when these opportunities are available, we’ll include links to them above.
Dunoon Goes POP garden creation
We are all about using locally grown plants to create really delicious flavours for our soft drinks.
So far our locally-inspired flavours:
Local clothing designer and shopkeeper Margaret Parker’s Parisienne lemonade infused with lavender. American Year’s cola with coriander, lavender and citrus, a new spin on a classic flavour. And, our rhubarb flavoured pop inspired by Dunoon Burgh Hall’s architect Robert Bryden.
With our community’s help, we’re turning an abandoned space at the back of the POP shop into a garden of flavour-giving plants that are good for soft-drinks, teas and our wellbeing. We want this garden to be good for wildlife as well as for people.
We’ll share opportunities to get involved as they arise.
Current opportunities:
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