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British brand Fentimans Victorian Lemonade contains trace amounts of alcohol…and that’s sparked a controversy that’s led the state of Maine to classify the lemon drink as “imitation liquor” and ban it from underage drinkers. It seems like a case of culture clash. Anchor Katy Clark has details.

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KATY CLARK: Old fashion lemonade. What could more wholesome? Lemon juice, water, sugar, and alcohol. Yup. Trace amounts of alcohol. That’s what a high school student in Maine discovered was in his bottle of British-made Fentiman’s Victorian Lemonade after he checked the ingredients. The main attorney general has now reclassified Fentiman’s Lemonade as imitation liquor. The company’s managing director, Eldon Robson, is not impressed.

ELDON ROBSON: It’s pretty pathetic to be quite honest with you. There’s nothing imitation about Fentiman’s at all. I find it particularly galling because people haven’t bothered to understand the proposition of what we’re up to.

CLARK: Robson’s family in Northeast England has been brewing soft drinks for over 100 years. He says trace amounts of alcohol are a byproduct of the brewing process. It’s found in lots of products from fruit juice to bread to chewing gum. And it would take a lot of lemonade to catch a buzz.

ROBSON: If you compare it to the equivalent of a pint of beer with 4 percent of alcohol in it you’d probably have to drink somewhere in the region of 25 half-pint bottles of Fentiman’s which would be absolutely impossible for anybody to do. And I think according to your metabolic rate anyway you’d probably lose it before you put that amount in your body anyway.

CLARK: Robson says it doesn’t surprise him that brouhaha erupted in a former British colony.

ROBSON: Our forefathers sort of went over there in the Mayflower, didn’t they, this puritanical sect. The fact that rules and regulations in the UK were to slack for them so they thought they’d set up on their own and it’s as if the old history is rising its ugly head once again.

CLARK: But in the Maine town where the alcohol was discovered by that high schooler, the chief of police says, we just want to make parents aware that the lemonade contains alcohol. This is PRI.

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