A Red Stripe brewer’s ginger beer crosses the Atlantic.

Old Jamaica Ginger Beer traces its story to Desnoes & Geddes, the Kingston company best known for brewing Red Stripe lager. English Wikipedia, citing the brand’s own website and The Oxford Companion to Beer, says the company was formed in 1918 by Eugene Peter Desnoes and Thomas Hargreaves Geddes, who combined their two shops into one business that first made soft drinks and distributed imported alcohol before opening the Surrey Brewery in Kingston. Old Jamaica’s website told the story in 2010: the two men had met at the West Indies Mineral and Table Water Company, where Desnoes had started work at the age of 12 as a “door opener.” English Wikipedia also says Desnoes & Geddes exports Old Jamaica Ginger Beer.

The British chapter began in 1988. The International Directory of Company Histories, in its entry on Desnoes & Geddes, says Ting, the grapefruit soda, and Old Jamaica Ginger Beer were introduced to the United Kingdom that year and were “instantly successful,” and it cites a 1991 report in The Grocer headlined “Desnoes & Geddes’ Jamaican Ginger Drink Takes Root.” The brand’s website has kept that year as its starting point: in 2013 its “About us” timeline ran from the arrival of ginger in Jamaica in the sixteenth century through the opening of the Surrey Brewery in 1927 to Old Jamaica’s British launch in 1988, and in 2019 it described Old Jamaica as “established in 1988” and “a genuine Jamaican brand.”

The brand has always sold itself on its ginger. In 2012 its website promised “real fiery Jamaican root ginger, from the heart of Jamaica” in every can, and a decade later it still said its drinks were made with “authentic Jamaican root ginger.” Those are the company’s own words. The same site has called Old Jamaica the UK’s number-one ginger beer since at least 2013.

Cott, Refresco and a sugar U-turn.

In Britain the brand came to be run by a soft-drinks bottler rather than by its Jamaican namesake. The terms and conditions on Old Jamaica’s website in 2014 and again in 2017 named Cott Beverages Limited, the British arm of Cott Corporation, as the company behind the site, with its registered office at Kegworth in Leicestershire.

Ownership moved with Cott’s bottling business. On 30 January 2018 the Dutch drinks maker Refresco completed its purchase of Cott’s carbonated soft drinks and juice bottling businesses in North America, the UK and Mexico for US$1.25 billion, English Wikipedia says, citing Beverage Daily and the Tampa Bay Times. Just Drinks reported in 2021 that Refresco had “inherited” Old Jamaica through that deal, as Cott Beverages had been the brand owner. By 2022 the website’s terms named the same British company under its new name, Refresco Drinks UK.

Under Refresco the range was reworked. The full-sugar version of Old Jamaica Ginger Beer was retired in 2018, Just Drinks reported, and brought back in March 2022. In September 2021 Refresco added two mixers, Old Jamaica Ginger Ale and Rhubarb & Ginger Ale, launched through Asda and Tesco, and it gave the Old Jamaica sodas a new look with a new flavour and bottle format, Just Drinks reported that month. By 2024 the website listed three ginger beers — Regular, Light and Extra Fiery — alongside the ginger ale. On draught, Vimto Out of Home, part of the soft-drinks group Nichols, says it supplies Old Jamaica exclusively to pubs and bars through its dispense guns.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make juices, squashes or soft drinks, and all of them are sold in Britain: Robinsons, Copella, Cawston Press, Rubicon, J2O, Shloer and Old Jamaica. British drinks brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names that still recall a founder or a farm to names that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a pub bar to a supermarket shelf.

A soft-drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single recipe than by a bottle or can, a name and the moment it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its drinks are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its drinks are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A farewell, a comeback and six colourways.

By 2024 the brand belonged to Beliv Company, a drinks group that describes itself as a “bevtech” business; The Grocer named Beliv as the brand’s supplier that year, and since 2025 the Old Jamaica website has carried the line “A Beliv Company Brand.” Beliv says it has also taken Old Jamaica to China.

Its owner then staged one of the more talked-about stunts in British soft drinks. In August 2024 Old Jamaica ran a campaign inviting drinkers to say farewell to the brand, with out-of-home advertising, social media posts and activations across London, including “Farewell Old Jamaica” messaging at the Notting Hill Carnival, The Grocer and Marketing Beat reported. Soon afterwards the brand confirmed it was not being discontinued but would be refreshed. The Grocer, in a comment piece, called the “retirement” a marketing gimmick, noting that the brand had been in long-term volume decline since at least 2019 even though its 2023 sales of £11.3 million were nearly two and a half times those of Bundaberg, its nearest rival in ginger beer.

The new identity reached shelves in spring 2025. It was created by SAMY Alliance, a social-first agency, and its campaign was led by Hernán Cerdeiro, the agency’s chief creative officer for the Americas, FMCG CEO, Asian Trader and Marketing Beat reported in April and May 2025. According to those reports, the redesign replaced the brand’s former browns and reds with six new colourways, swapped the palm-fringed beach scene that had framed the packs for some 35 years for a simplified, stylised palm icon, and streamlined the wordmark, which keeps nods to its original Old English-style lettering; the supporting typefaces are named as Brule Bold and Cera Pro Black. Alfonso Haces, Beliv’s senior global marketing head, said the new look was meant to give the brand a bold, modern presence, and The Grocer reported that it was designed to appeal to “the next generation of ginger beer drinkers.”

For a design guide, Old Jamaica shows how a ginger beer can hold on to a Caribbean origin story through three owners and then rebuild its look around a single palm and a run of bright colours. Compare Rubicon, another British soft drink built on exotic flavours, and J2O, a British adult soft drink. For this guide we use a root brown, a ginger red and a sunshine yellow with a bold sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Old Jamaica’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.