A bubbly soft drink’s the toast of Kentucky : Move over bourbon and moonshine. Locally-made soda pop becomes the favorite whistle-wetter.

It is a beverage known to Kentuckians to be highly addictive. Golden in color, it is rumored to have almost mystical properties that transcend its known active ingredients. Once they’re hooked, which usually happens at an alarmingly early age, they won’t leave home without it. People have turned to crime to obtain it.

Kentucky Bourbon? Mountain Moonshine?

No. It’s Ale 8-1, a bubbly soft drink flavored with Asian ginger that has been manufactured in Winchester by the same family since the 1920s and sold mostly in the surrounding area. With 140,000 bottles a day produced, Ale 8-1 may be small stuff compared to soft-drink giants like Coke and Pepsi, but none of the big guys ever inspired this kind of fanatical devotion.

For instance, there was this recent item from the police reports of the Winchester Sun: “Marcia T. Arthur told the Clark County Sheriff’s Department someone pried open the door of her home between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. Wednesday and stole one bottle of Ale 8-1.”

Then there’s the janitor at the county high school, who’s widely known to just about match his salary by gathering up the empties and redeeming them at the plant. And the students at the University of Kentucky who consider Ale 8-1 heavy fuel for exam cramming.

The empirically minded attribute the drink’s powers to high concentrations of sugar and caffeine. “It’s got six times the caffeine of a regular soft drink,” proclaims Ruth Tinsley, an Ale 8-1 loyalist who was loading up on a weekend’s supply--a case--at a Kroger’s supermarket in nearby Lexington. “This stuff’ll really keep you going.”

But that perception is wrong, according to Riley Rogers Walton, the company’s vice president. “People think it’s loaded with sugar and caffeine, but it actually has less of each than most soft drinks,” she says. “But we don’t talk about it much because there are probably more people who drink it because they think it does , than don’t drink it for the same reason.”

So maybe its chemical properties are mild. How, then, do you account for somebody like Bo Barnes, an attorney in Frankfort, Ky., who once filled up a suitcase with cans of Ale 8-1 to take with him on a trip to Germany. Thinking the contents looked suspicious, customs officials required him to open the case.

“They said, ‘You’ve come to trade this for German beer,’ ” recalls Barnes, who says he drinks between five and nine bottles of Ale 8-1 a day. “I told them, ‘No, I’m going to be here two weeks and I can’t go that long without this stuff.’ ”

The formula for Ale 8-1 was developed in the 1920s by G. L. Wainscott, who had been in the soft drink business in Winchester since 1902, producing Roxa-Kola, a local challenger to national brand colas. Wainscott introduced Ale 8-1 after holding one of the nation’s first name-that-brand contests.

The winner was a 15-year-old girl, her name long forgotten, who coined the name as a pun on the phrase “A Late One,” which as near as any of the present owners can figure out, was an admittedly convoluted play on the concept of the beverage being “the latest thing.” (On the other hand, locals have embraced the slogan as a testimony to the drink’s powers as a stimulant.) At any rate, the name stuck and so did the product. The firm phased out Roxa-Kola in 1964 to concentrate on Ale 8-1.

Eventually, the company was bequeathed to Frank Rogers Jr., the founder’s nephew, who at 76 still works in the business, but prefers to be on the bottling line. His son, Frank (Buddy) Rogers III, is president.

From the start, its founder sought to hype the drink’s invigorating qualities. “For bracing pep” boasted the label. “It glorifies. Especially enjoyed by women and children.”

And so it continues to be. The company is frequently asked to ship cases of the drink to people’s sons and daughters in the military, a tradition that extended from Vietnam to Desert Storm.

Rogers, the current president, doesn’t put much stock in all that mystical mumbo jumbo. He thinks people like it because it tastes good.

“It’s the only soft drink in the world that doesn’t have an aftertaste,” he asserts, while downing a bottle. “And it’s the only soft drink that tastes good at room temperature. I’ll leave one open on the night stand before I go to bed, and take a drink out of it the next morning and it still tastes fine.”

Rogers has had to endure the slings and arrows of big colas. One national distributor dismissed Ale-8’s popularity in this way: “He said, ‘You Kentuckians are so inbred your taste buds have mutated. You just use it to chase moonshine.’ ”

But not long after that Rogers went back to his own loading dock to find a man loading nine cases of green-and-white Ale-8 bottles into a truck with Alaska plates. Heading back north to work on the pipeline, the man told Rogers: “My wife said if I got within 500 miles of Winchester and didn’t bring back a load of Ale 8-1, not to come back.”