Our Carbonated beverages

We had the idea quite early on, before we purchased our coffee trike, that it would be a lot of fun to sell something that we'd made from scratch, another commodity to supplement our coffee sales. Because of our experience as cocktail bartenders we were both very comfortable making drinks. Squeezing and blending fruits and spices to make soft drinks was a quick and compelling thought but this idea didn't get truly exciting until we thought about carbonating and bottling them.

A rhubarb and star anise experiment mid-production

We started doing some experiments with different flavour combinations. Principally we attempted to make original compounds but occasionally we'd try a twist on classic recipe, like a cream soda with salted caramel, things like that.

After the initial flavour development stage in my kitchen we then advanced to batch production for sales on the trike

Larger batch production meant we needed to buy more base ingredients, a lot more! To accommodate the large amount of fruit we now had to transport from New Covent Garden Market to our work space we had to buy a little trailer that would attach to my bicycle. We found a great company called 'Chain Reaction' and they made us one of their 'Y trailers' which worked perfectly.  

One of many trips to buy fruit from the
 market using the 'Y trailer'

Pitting plums

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Juicing plums

We make the component ingredient for the drink ourselves. If one of our sparkling soft drink has plums in it then (like you can see in the pictures) we don't buy in pre-made juice. We go to the market and buy some plums, pitted them and then juice them. Similarly with any syrups or anything else. If it's in there then we've made it. This give us a nice feeling of satisfaction and a lot of control over our finish product.

Christelle labelling our bottles

The only down side of doing each stage of production ourselves is that it can be very time consuming. Luckily I have some good friends to help me out, like my flatmate Christelle, although I'm not sure how happy she is about it.

The reaction to our soft drinks on the trike as been very good. We've had a few cafe owners interested in stocking them. Because of this we are going to start production in a wholesale capacity. Currently we are looking for our large space for large production volumes.