There are two main ways most places serve bubbly water: one that requires equipment and one that doesn’t. “If you have cold brew concentrate and seltzer, that’s all you need to start experimenting,” says Behne. No Equipment RequiredĪ café doesn’t need taps to create fizzy drinks, however. Garrison recommends under-filling nitro kegs and then shaking them to distribute the nitrogen thoroughly for better frothing. “Just like in a brewery, you need to clean your tips and taps,” says Chris Garrison, owner of Old World Coffee in Reno, Nevada. I can’t see what’s going on, but I have to ensure I’m keeping it as clean as the espresso machine,” says Behne. “A lot of tap lines are hidden, kind of behind-the-scenes work. With taps comes the critical task of keeping lines clean. One crucial piece of advice that 42 & Lawrence learned from their research: pure carbonation can’t be added to coffee, unlike beer, as it creates too much acid. Before opening, the owners spoke with bartenders and brewers and eventually decided to build their own nitrogenators. 42 & Lawrence has six taps that push nitrogen and carbon dioxide to produce nitro cold brew, draft lattes, coffee sodas, and more. Many cafés turn to the beer industry for pointers on how to scale up sparkling and draft drinks. Making something single-serving is very different than making something for three shops to sell hundreds of a week,” Swanson says. “It’s so difficult to make a high-quality chai that you can also mass produce. Recipes must not only be delicious, but they must also be scalable. Swanson has tried to make sparkling matcha, which she says was “the worst,” though she’d like to figure out how to do it one day. “Customers can find a good mocha or cappuccino at a million different coffee shops, but there’s only one place they can get a Sun Ship,” he says. Ghost Note’s Andrews spent four months perfecting a drink called the Sun Ship, made with espresso, smoked grapefruit rosemary syrup, coconut water, sparkling water, and lime.īut his persistence paid off-fizzy drinks are what set Ghost Note apart from other cafes in the neighborhood. Often, rising to that creative challenge requires commitment. “We have all these great tasting notes in these great coffees, so how can you complement them without milk? The second you get a group of baristas excited about creating something like that, you’ll get things coming out of your shop that you would’ve never thought of.” “It’s that fun challenge of creating something that hasn’t been done before,” says Jeremy Behne, director of coffee at 42 & Lawrence, a coffee lab created by Larry’s Coffee in Raleigh, North Carolina.īehne loves using sparkling water to complement the flavors in coffee. Sparkling Ahead Of The Crowdįor some shops, the complexity of sparkling drinks is part of the allure. But when planned well and incorporated into a cafe menu, sparkling drinks can capture the attention of potential customers no matter the season. Special equipment and ingredients are often needed, as well as an understanding of the processes behind creating sparkling drinks, whether at the foundational level of recipe creation or at a more niche level of cleaning kegerator equipment. Sparkling, fizzy, and bubbly drinks-be they beverages made with actual sparkling water or carbonated with a keg or nitro system-are incredibly popular, but they’re not always simple to make. “Our signature drinks became, ‘Oh, this is the coffee shop that makes those crazy cocktail drinks.’” “We weren’t expecting our signature drinks to take off and define us as much as they do,” says Christos Andrews, co-owner and coffee/beverage director at Ghost Note. At Seattle’s Ghost Note Coffee, 90 percent of the photos customers share online feature signature drinks with sparkling or tonic water.
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