Story
Born shaken
Most drinks companies would like you to believe nothing has ever gone wrong in their kitchen. Ours started with a flood.
In 2023 two of us were home-brewing sodas in a shared kitchen in Hackney Wick — over-juiced, over-carbonated, stored badly, in the way of every hobby that has not met commerce yet. A crate got knocked down a flight of stairs. Twelve cans of prototype yuzu-ginger went off like a small municipal fountain.
Here is the thing: the survivors tasted better. Agitation had woken the ginger particulate out of the sediment and put it back in the liquid where it belonged. Every other soda on earth tells you to keep it still and pour it gently. Ours genuinely improves if you turn the can over — once, slowly — before opening. The botanicals are supposed to move.
So we stopped apologising for it. The company is named after the defect. The label instruction — the only one we print — is the opposite of everyone else's. And the brand is loud because the drink is loud; a polite pastel can would be lying to you about what is inside.
Three years on: four flavours, one railway arch, a canning line named Susan, and a rule that nothing goes in a can that we cannot pronounce, grow, press or steep.
The method
Two things colliding is a recipe
Every flavour is a collision: yuzu against ginger, blood orange against chilli, cucumber against Sichuan pepper, butterfly pea against lime. One ingredient makes the promise, the second one breaks it politely.
What we will not do
No caffeine
The market said an energy variant would triple the business. The market can drink coffee. These are sodas; the loudness is flavour, not stimulant.
No sweeteners
Raw cane sugar, dosed low — 16 to 22 kcal per 100 ml — and pressed juice doing the rest. If a recipe needs syrup to work, the recipe is wrong.
No supermarkets
Independent fridges only. Partly principle, mostly practicality: the cold chain we insist on ends at a wall of ambient shelving in aisle seven.