Coming soon to Beer Table - dried lemon, juniper & hops soda!

Last week we dropped off a keg of apple & ginger carbonated juice with the good folks at Beer Table (in Park Slope) who now have a dedicated soda draft line. It seemed to go over well which made us very happy. This week Antonio has been hard at work finalizing the recipe for a more experimental bitter soda -  a dried lemon, juniper & hops soda - which we think will go great with the range of beer that Beer Table has.

The dried lemons we picked up from our favorite spice store in Manhattan, Dual Speciality Store in the East Village. These are lemons or limes that have been dried in the sun until they are hard, dry and nearly black. Apparently they are used in some middle eastern cuisines.  We had been eyeing them for months, wondering what they tasted like (delicious tart, lemony, earthy funk!) and finally decided to pick some up and try some recipes.  Juniper berries (not really a berry, but the female seed cone produced by some species of juniper trees) are used in northern European cuisines, and are one of the predominant flavors in gin. Hops of course are used in beer, we used chinook hops, a very bitter and very aromatic variety used in American style IPA's.  So, while these components are from very different places, they have overlapping but still complementary flavor profiles that make for a nice mix- the tartness and earthiness of the lemons seems to pair really well with the piney aromatics of the juniper berries and the bitter, citrousy notes of the chinook hops.  There is also a touch of raw honey to balance things out, though the soda is not at all sweet. 

.

Look for this flavor at Beer Table sometime early January, and stop by now to try some apple ginger and some great beer.

Strawberry, hops & pink peppercorn! And an article on CHOW.com

It's strawberry season in south Jersey!  The crop this year seems to be quite big - I picked up 2 flats of strawberries from Cherry Lane farm (they have a stand at Union Square farmer's market).

And Tony has wanted to try out a hops soda for months now, so here we go. We picked up fresh local hops from Brooklyn Kitchn (Chinook hops) and steeped them with ground up pink peppercorn to extract the floral notes without too much of the bitter flavors. We'll be debuting this at the Flea this Saturday, so come by and check it out.

And in other news, thanks to Roxanne the associate editor at CHOW.com for including us in her article on how food entrepreneurs are using platforms like kickstarter.com to start businesses. We've mentioned this a several times before, but we really couldn't have done this without the help of people who pledged to us on Kickstarter.  It's a great platform and we encourage anyone with an idea to use it.
The story can be read here: http://www.chow.com/stories/12176?tag=main_body;feature_story

Cascade hops soda, with pink peppercorn & orange zest

Hop Soda?!

We love beer over here at brooklyn soda works, especially good, crisp, hoppy american IPAs.  Today we decided to try out a bitter soda made from hops.  The idea was to combine the pine/grapefruit aroma and bitterness of fresh cascade hops with the fruity/herbal spice of pink peppercorn and some orange zest to round it out.  

First try was just way too bitter- we used about 20 fresh Cascade hop flowers and boiled for about 30 min.  Most of the great aroma of the hops was lost in the boil and a we got a whole lot of bitterness that overwhelmed the more delicate peppercorn and orange zest flavors.  

Second try was much better- 2 tablespoons of pink peppercorns boiled in 1L of water for about 15 min, then the hot water was poured over 7 hop flowers and the zest of 1 orange.  Let it sit until it cooled and then sweetened lightly with about 1/4 cup of sugar.  

Yummmmm, tastes nothing like beer but should appeal to beer fans or anyone who likes hops or other bitter and floral tastes.