Chicory root
Cichorium intybus
Roasted dark for the cola note and for the fibre. The bitterness is deliberate — it is what stops a soda from tasting like a dessert.
Botanical soda · Ebro valley
Nine grams of fibre. Three of sugar.
Nine whole roots, barks and flowers, fermented twenty-one days in the dark. No cane sugar, no isolates, no flavour powder. The bitterness is the plant, and the fibre comes with it.
Plate II · the topsoil · −1 m
Nine things go in.
None of them are syrup.
We buy whole roots and dried barks from three farms inside nine kilometres of the cellar, and mill them the week they arrive. What you taste is the plant itself, not a factory's copy of it. Three of the nine are drawn below.
Sweet birch bark
Betula lenta
Steam-drawn, never distilled down to an oil. It carries the wintergreen lift that makes the first sip read cold even at room temperature.
Hibiscus calyx
Hibiscus sabdariffa
Cold-steeped so it stays red instead of turning brown. It carries all of the acidity in three of the five. No citric acid is added.
Plate III · the root zone · −9 m
A root does not
hurry.
01Inulin, intactDrawn out below 60 °C and blended in after the cellar, so the chain reaches you whole — as fibre, not as sugar.
03No isolate powdersIf it cannot be brewed out of a plant, it does not enter the tank. Nine plants on the label. Nothing else.
02Nine grams of fibrePer 355 ml — near a third of what most people manage in a day.
04Two to four grams of sugarWhatever the roots bring with them — a tenth of what a regular cola pours in. No sugar is added at the end.
Plate IV · the cellar · −18 m
Twenty-one days
Twenty-one days
in the dark.
That is how long a lactic culture needs to eat the sugar down from eleven grams a litre to under three. It returns acid and carbon dioxide, never alcohol.
01/ 21
| Stage | Lactic culture pitched |
| Cellar temperature | 19.0 °C |
| Residual sugar | 11.0 g/l |
| Alcohol | under 0.5 % ABV |
Plate V · the aquifer · −31 m
The water was
here first.
Drawn from a confined limestone aquifer beneath the plain — rain that fell long before the town above it was built. We filter out the particles and change nothing else. Every number in the table below is the one the rock put there.
Fig. 5 · the confined aquifer, in section
| Analysis at source | Value |
|---|---|
| Bicarbonate | 0mg/l |
| Calcium | 0mg/l |
| Reaction | 0pH |
| Depth of draw | 0metres |
Plate VI · coming back up
Five ways out
of the ground.
Sarsaparilla & Birch
root beer, grown up
3 g sugar9 g fibre
Elderflower & Sorrel
hedgerow, cut grass, lemon
2 g sugar9 g fibre
Hibiscus & Ginger
sharp, red, faintly hot
4 g sugar9 g fibre
Chicory & Cocoa Root
dark, dry, almost coffee
2 g sugar10 g fibre
Juniper & Meadowsweet
pine needles over cold stone
3 g sugar9 g fibre
01 / 05
Drag or scroll
Colophon · back at the surface · 0 m
Come up
for air.
Twelve cans, mixed or matched, delivered. Or leave a postcode and we will name the nearest shelf that already stocks it.
On the shelf at
Whole FoodsSproutsErewhonBristol FarmsCentral Market