London’s going pop: The soda fountain is back
If you’re an adult in London it’s totally cool to spend your weekend in a ball pool or at a sing-a-long screening of your favourite Disney movie. We love regressing to take our minds off our daily stresses, and drinks have finally caught up with this trend.
Sometimes a good fizzy pop is what you need to hit the spot, but London has more sophisticated offerings. Coin Laundry’s brand of homely nostalgia in Exmouth Market is not just limited to the chicken kiev and asparagus quiche on the menu. It also has a Sodastream. For a soft drink there’s a mix of pear, clove, calamondin lemonade (calamondin is a type of citrus fruit, beloved of soda stalwarts) and pomegranate, and there’s also an alcoholic Sodastream cocktail of lime, pear and clove with a choice of gin, rum or scotch.
In Soho, London’s star Sri Lankan spot Hoppers now has durian cream soda on the menu. The South-East Asian fruit is used to flavour Hopper cream soda made in-house and served with a fresh- whipped pineapple float. Durian has a reputation as the smelliest fruit in the world — its odour has been described as turpentine and onions garnished with sock — but it works here.
James Stevenson, group bar manager, says: “The thick yellow freshness can elevate many desserts and ice creams with something that’s reminiscent of a rich tropical custard. To make the soda at Hoppers I take a durian paste (using fresh may clear out the restaurant) and blend that with some fresh vanilla. I then add an acidifier, which is the tart flavour in a lot of commercial sodas that gives it that old-school cream soda feel. Then we add filtered water and carbonate the drink to a high pressure to ensure it’s super-fizzy.”
The 12 drinks of summer
Coffee connoisseurs are producing their own riffs on grown-up pop. Mast Brothers use chocolate to make a fizzy soda that has a dry taste and a sweet kick at the end. And at the London Coffee Festival in April, Climpson & Sons created Indian Sunset cascara soda, pictured — it’s now produced regularly.
Cascara is the husk of the coffee cherry, which is produced in huge quantities when ripe coffee cherries are pulped before the beans are washed and dried. It’s often seen as waste and used as fertiliser but drying out the husks and brewing them like tea makes a refreshing drink.
Nicole Ferris, at Climpson’s, says re-using the husks is sustainable and delicious: “When brewed the flavour is intensified to create a concentrated, syrupy sweetness. Our soda, paired with blood orange and bergamot, is the perfect combination to enhance the juicy sweetness. For a refreshing summer drink I add ice and gin — perhaps the new Pimm’s of the coffee industry.”
Hackney is fast becoming a soda capital. Square Root, which started there, is ever-expanding and you can see it popping up at KERB events through the summer. It introduces a new flavour every month — July’s will be raspberry lemonade, and it’s rumoured to be cherry in August. It’s popping.
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