Flavors for Saturday! Our tote bag! and nice nod from Sara Jenkins of Porchetta

We're doing a repeat of the basic flavors of last week, except we're switching out the Empire apples for Jonagold apples, and upped the ginger level in the apple and ginger.

So:
Apple and ginger (Jonagold apples from Red Jacket Orchard)
Cucumber, lime & sea salt
Lemon & thyme

Also, thanks to Sara Jenkins (chef of Porchetta the wonderful pork sandwich shop in the East Village) for mentioning us in her NY Magazine Grub Street profile of what she was eating last week:
http://newyork.grubstreet.com/2010/04/porchetta_chef_sara_jenkins.html
Her diet looks pretty great - nice to know we're in good company!

Also, our tote bags have arrived - we'll take some with us to the booth tomorrow. Use it to put your finds from the Flea in:

Homemade: Brooklyn Event tonight! and a bit of press from Inc.com

Made a spiced ginger beer for tonight's event with Homemade: Brooklyn.  We'll be selling ginger beer during the Kong Magazine's reading event.

Location: 522 Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg

Also, a nice little write up about how Kickstarter helped up achieve our start up costs on Inc.com:

http://www.inc.com/guides/2010/04/using-kickstarter-for-business.html

Flavors for Saturday! And flip-top bottles to take home soda!

New flavors this week:
- lemon, thyme and green peppercorn
It's amazing how different thyme from different places can look. The thyme on the above left is from the Union Square Farmer's market, and the one on the right is from a farmers market in NJ.  It seems like the one on the left is younger and lighter tasting (the leaves are bigger), while the bunch on the right has smaller denser leaves.
- Apple with ginger (Empire apples from Red Jacket Orchards in the Fingerlakes Region of NY).  We know its not apple season, but we saw the heap of gorgeous Empire apples at the Farmers Market and we couldn't resist. We had made a green apple & ginger soda before, just using Granny Smith apples, and the result was very tart and refreshing but we wanted to try a different apple this time. Empire apples are a small red apple, that's a good balance between sweet and tart.

And our returning flavor of: cucumber, lime and sea salt!

Plus we'll have some flip-top bottles for sale that we'll fill up for you at the Brooklyn Flea with your soda of choice. A number of people have been asking about taking our carbonated beverages home, and we want to encourage people to bring their own containers and bottles so providing people with flip-top bottles seems to be a good solution.  Let us know what you think!

On another note, we bought a Blichmann beer gun for more efficient bottling from Brooklyn Home Brew (which have been so great resource - they have a wonderful selection of equipment, hops and anything else you'd need for home brewing).

Round 2! and how you can help earthquake relief efforts in Western China

Was going to make a cream soda for Saturday, but I'm not totally satisfied with my recipe yet...  my sister Sarah gave me some helpful tips regarding vanilla beans so hopefully we'll have it down by next week.

In the meantime, since it's been a busy week with Tony away in Mississippi until yesterday, we decided we'd repeat the flavours we did last week - with a couple of major differences:
1. no peeling of the ginger. it's a gargantuan task when it's 10lbs of ginger root
2. no peeling of cucumber - we've been curious whether the skin on the cucumber will add more foam to the soda, and if there will be a noticeable change in taste.

And there was a serious earthquake in Qinghai province, in western China 3 days ago. It's a very remote, mountainous and poor region of China, and while the scope of the damage was nowhere near close to the huge one that rocked Sichuan province in 2008, this nonetheless has affected a population of people that is still in relief supplies and aid, with the death toll over 1000 as of today.

10% of sales on Saturday will be donated to the earthquake relief effort. I'm still deciding which organization to give money to, but it will probably be Red Cross or Mercy Corps.  Google has a very convenient link to relief organizations working in the area if you wish to contribute.

Photos from first day of Flea! And a bit of press from Offmanhattan and Dirty Hands NY

Sorry for the delay!  Here are photos from our first day at the Flea:

happy & colourful customers

After running around all morning lugging around heavy kegs and coolers, we finally got our booth set up around 10:30am (must remember to get a good hand truck this week)

Wonderful roving band that appeared from seemingly nowhere

this is what happens with the dregs of the soda from the bottom of the keg - we drink it. from our measuring cup apparently.

And thanks to Chermelle from Offmanhattan.com for stopping by and taking a couple of photos for her photo essay on the Flea (you can see her story here)

Special thanks to Liza from dirtyhandsny.com, a multimedia project that focuses on creative, DIY New Yorkers, for profiling us. Her photo-essay which covers all steps from our experiments in the kitchen to our tasting party with friends, is up here: http://dirtyhandsny.com/2010/04/15/brooklyn-soda-works/

Success!

Our first Saturday at the Brooklyn Flea was a wonderful success!  The weather was breezy but sunny, and the turnout was great.  I guess people were thirsty because we completely sold out of 5 kegs by 4pm!

More photos to come later...

Debuting at the Flea- our 3 flavors

Insanely busy past couple of days! Was at the Palo Santo kitchen preparing the sodas till 4am last night, and just finished carbonating them. And I just finished making my blackboard sign in the shape of a bottle.

Our 3 flavours we will be debuting at the Brooklyn Flea tomorrow, in the outdoor location at Fort Greene:

- lemon ginger beer

- grapefruit, jalapeno & honey

- cucumber, lime & sea salt

Looking forward to meeting some of our fellow food vendors, including People's Pops who checked out our ginger beer as a potential flavor for use in their rhubarb ginger-beer pop.  

Crossing our fingers for a sunny Saturday!

A chat with Eleanor from 2 Cooks In the Kitchen

Eleanor, a fellow food lover, who I met while working at the Brooklyn Museum, has posted a wonderful profile of us on her blog, 2 Cooks In the Kitchen, a collaborative blog from a former vegan and a meat lover from different sides of the coast, and searching New York for various culinary resources.

thanks Eleanor!

Cream Soda attempt!

Things have started to get busy here at the headquarters of Brooklyn Soda Works (meaning the kitchen of the apartment). We're gearing up for our debut at the Brooklyn Flea in 9 days, trying to work out last minute technical glitches and ordering the last of our supplies, as well as trying to determine our starting lineup for flavors!

However that doesn't mean we haven't stopped working on new flavors and trying out new ingredients. I attempted a cream soda the other night. I have very fond memories of downing Schweppes cream sodas during summers in Hong Kong.  The history of cream soda and its different variations across the globe can be read here.  The main ingredient is vanilla, so I boiled up 2 vanilla beans for 45 minutes in 1L of water, let it cool, then added zest of half a lemon and 1tsp of lemon juice (for acidity).
The result!

It was a tad too lemony even with only 1 teaspoon of lemon juice, but wonderfully refreshing nonetheless with a great vanilla aroma that I admit was not present in my beloved Schweppes cream sodas of my childhood.