Fizz (39 page)

Price, however, is just one battlefront in the new obesity-inspired war on soda. Another is portion size, where New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg's bid to limit soda serving sizes in the city's food establishments to sixteen ounces is leading the charge. A clash between Bloomberg and the soda industry had been brewing for some time. The New York mayor had already required the city's restaurants to display calorie counts on their menus and tried—unsuccessfully—to get the federal government to ban people from buying soda with food stamps. Then there was “Don't drink yourself fat,” an off-putting TV ad in which a man pours a vile gloop of
liquid and solid fat into a glass from a cola can before messily guzzling away. “All over the United States, public health officials are wringing their hands saying, ‘Oh, this is terrible,'” Bloomberg told the
New York Times.
“New York City is not about wringing your hands; it's about doing something.”

The serving-size ban became yet another big-budget fight between public health officials and the soda industry, which ran ads showing Bloomberg dressed up as an old woman, with the slogan “New Yorkers need a mayor, not a nanny.” But this time the only votes that counted were those of the city's Board of Health, and its members were all appointed by Bloomberg. On September 13, 2012, the measure got approval, limiting the Big Apple's restaurants, food trucks, concert halls, delis, stadiums, and movie theaters to serving sizes of sixteen ounces or less for nondiet soda. “This is the biggest step a city has taken to curb obesity,” said Bloomberg as he announced the decision. “Simply by proposing limits on sugary drinks, New York City pushed the issue of obesity—and the impact of sugary beverages—onto the national stage. The Board of Health's passing of this proposal means that New Yorkers will soon consume fewer junk calories and eventually begin turning the tide of the obesity epidemic that is destroying the health of far too many of our citizens.”

The following month a group of business groups, including the American Beverage Association, launched a joint lawsuit against the measure on the grounds that the New York City health authorities had overstepped the limits of their power by introducing such a ban. The lawsuit worked. On Monday June 11, 2013—the day before the ban was due to start—the Supreme Court of the State of New York ruled against Bloomberg, who immediately announced plans to appeal. Yet even as Bloomberg slugged it out with Big Soda in the New York courts, just a short stroll away from his Manhattan office over the East River, a new breed of soda could be found amid the food stalls of the Brooklyn Flea's Smorgasburg food market.

Brooklyn Soda Works started out in 2010 as a search for the perfect cocktail mixer by installation artist Caroline Mak and chemist Antonio Ramos. “We both love making things and always liked to do projects together,” recalls Ramos. “In the beginning of 2010, we started with a project to make the perfect mixer, starting with a classic Dark ‘n' Stormy ginger beer. We
tried carbonating it with yeast to make an alcoholic ginger beer and had a lot of fun with it.”

The ginger beer experiments got the couple interested in taking their carbonation adventures further. “Around the same time a lot of the DIY soda siphons came out in the home ware supply stores,” says Mak. “They all said only use these to carbonate water, nothing else, but the two of us went: ‘Screw that, let's try and carbonate whatever we can.'”

And that they did, zapping any liquid they could with bubbles of carbon dioxide. “We just threw everything we could think of in there to see what happened,” says Ramos. “We tried carbonating milk. It was gross. We tried bourbon. That was wrong. It gets you really drunk, really quick. It's almost like champagne, the bubbles make it go to your head. It was a little too intense with all the alcohol burn and the carbonation burn. It was an assault on the senses, but it was fun.”

They also tried carbonating juices, starting with orange and apple before progressing to more exotic combinations. Soon they found themselves with soda recipes that, unlike the fizzy milk and bourbon, tasted great while still offering something far removed from the likes of Fanta. Drinks like apple and ginger (“our signature flavor,” says Mak); or grapefruit, jalapeño, and honey; or cucumber, lime, and sea salt (a mix of freshly squeezed cucumber and lime juice plus a pinch of salt and a dash of cane sugar). The pair wondered if other people would enjoy their unusual soda combos as much as they and their friends did, so they decided to test it out by getting a stall on the Brooklyn Flea food markets, where they charged around four dollars a cup. “We hooked up a few kegs onto our draw system—we don't bottle, everything is in kegs. We sold out in four hours and realized we that we had a potential mini-business we could develop,” says Mak.

Brooklyn Soda Works was born, and in the two years since its public debut in 2010, the hobby-turned-business has grown into a six days a week operation with three employees and an eighteen-hundred-square-foot production space. Not to mention deals to supply several upscale restaurants, including Blue Hill, the swanky Greenwich Village eatery where the Obamas dined when they visited New York in 2009. “Most of our customers, I would say, are people who had given up on soda for health reasons or
because they didn't like the idea of the preservatives or the sugar and drank juice most regularly, but can now go: ‘Wait, I can have something carbonated without all the sugar and additives,'” says Ramos. “There's no shortage of products at the lower-end price scale of soda, but what's missing is a premium, artisanal product. There was a big desire for that, but not much going on in nonalcoholic beverages so people were very excited by it.”

Brooklyn Soda Works' small-scale soda production offers its customers something very different from Coca-Cola and Pepsi: a chance to feel a personal connection with their drink. It is an appeal not far removed from that of the craft beer makers, which have exploded in number so much that they make up almost 98 percent of the breweries operating in the United States today. And nor was Brooklyn Soda Works a one-off. Although still tiny in number, all across the United States small artisan soda companies are popping up. From Oregon to Maine tiny soda outfits are putting the passion back into fizz and winning over lapsed soda drinkers. Outfits such as Humdinger Craft Soda, making its soda in the basement of St. Patrick's Church in Richmond, Virginia, or Maria's Packaged Goods & Community Bar in Chicago, which came up with a custom ginger ale to use in its cocktails.

The craft soda movement might yet prove to be a false dawn, but if the trend for craft beer is anything to go by, a new alternative soda boom may be in the works. None of that, of course, helps the giants of the soda world, who increasing resemble Gulliver, tied down by the miniature people of Lilliput, as changing consumer tastes, craft sodas, energy drinks, health campaigners, lawmakers, research studies, bottled water, falling sales, and new age beverages assail them.

Soda has come a long way since Joseph Priestley first began experimenting with water over the fermenting beer vats in the English city of Leeds back in 1767. The sticky sugary fingerprints of the Age of Soda can be found all over the world. Soda spawned laws of physics, occupied the attentions of some of humanity's greatest figures, and provided the tools for some of the first anesthetists. Their fizzy pleasures introduced us to new flavors, encouraged us to drink ice-cold beverages, made us smile, and even became part of our national identity. The soda business gave us the world's most famous brand, the concept of coupons, the drive-in restaurant, and
new approaches to advertising. It reshaped our shops and our streets, encouraged prohibition, covered up the moonshine, helped us become a throwaway society, and set Michael Jackson's hair on fire. Soda even influenced geopolitics, priming US presidents, puncturing holes in the iron and bamboo curtains, and pumping money into underdeveloped nations when no one else would. And it also helped to make us fat.

But even as the sales slide and the health criticism mounts, soda is far from dead. Soda is still—by a substantial margin—the most popular type of beverage in America. The soda giants have barely started tapping into the potentially enormous markets of India and China, where people still drink far less soda than the worldwide average. And then there's the holy grail: a no-calorie, natural sweetener with no aftertaste. Sounds too good to be true? Maybe, but those in the soda business who are searching for this miracle sweetener are confident. The Dr Pepper Snapple Group, the US beverage company formed in 2008 after Cadbury Schweppes split its beverage and confectionery businesses, expects a breakthrough in the next few years. Al Carey, head of the beverage unit for the Americas at PepsiCo, told the
Huffington Post:
“I can't say when it will be here, but it's in the reasonable future.”

What form this ultimate sweetener will take is unknown. It could be a single sweetener or a mix of several different sweeteners. It could also be a fusion of natural calorie-free sweeteners, natural sweetness enhancers such as the miracle fruit plant that makes sour taste sweet, and a small amount of sugar. “I think that's the way the industry is going to go and I don't think it is pie-in-the-sky at all,” says Jacobson. “A combination of a high potency sweetener and a sweetness enhancer, maybe with a little sugar, will—I think—yield good-tasting products with very few problems. If they do achieve this then the problems with soda would be greatly diminished.”

Whatever the exact combination, there's no doubt that the ultimate sweetener would be a game changer, shooting down both the cancer fears that still plague artificial sweeteners and the accusations that soda is fattening the nation. Soda might be on the ropes, but it's far from dead, and its world-changing story may have only just begun. The Age of Soda might not be over yet.

As with any book there are many people whose help has been invaluable. First and foremost my partner Jay Priest for, well, just about everything. Not least acting as a human photocopier in various archives, driving ludicrous distances across America, and being willing to put up with me and a fridge filled with random sodas while I researched and wrote this book.

Another big thanks goes to my tireless, go-getting agent Isabel Atherton of Creative Authors, without whom you wouldn't be reading this now, and to Chicago Review Press for taking on the book and my editor Yuval Taylor and project editor Devon Freeny for their insights, suggestions, and patience.

The research for this book would have been a lot harder without the staff at the various museums, libraries, and archives I found myself in while researching
Fizz.
A special thank-you goes to the staff at the Dr Pepper Museum in Waco, in particular Joy Summar-Smith, Mary Beth Tait, and Charlie Stanford (who deserves extra credit for his sterling work in tracking down much of the information I was looking for before I even got to Waco).

Equally deserving of thanks are the staff at the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University for their help with my epic trawl through their Coca-Cola collections. I'm also much obliged to the staff at Lewes Library in East Sussex, the Mass Observation Archive team
at the University of Sussex, and Marie Force of the Delta Air Transport Heritage Museum.

Thanks also to: Bob and Ann McGarrah for their generous hospitality, recollections, and the Pepsi space cans; Colin Emmins for his pointers on British soda history; Amanda Rosseter and the archivists of the Coca-Cola Company; Caroline Mak and Antonio Ramos of Brooklyn Soda Works; John Risse for his insights on Robert Woodruff's time at Coca-Cola; and Keith Blount for inventing Scrivener, which made the process of writing this book so much easier than my last. Further thank-yous go to Michael Jacobson, Eric Marcoux, C. J. Rapp, Neil Verlander, and Douglas Woodward for taking the time to be interviewed for this book.

I'd also like to say thanks to Mark Pendergrast, author of
For God, Country & Coca-Cola;
Frederick Allen, author of
Secret Formula;
and Douglas Simmons, author of
Schweppes: The First 200 Years.
All three books were valuable sources of information, and Mark deserves an extra thank-you for helping to weed out Coke-related errors and myths.

Finally, thanks to the A&W server who provided me and Jay with endless amusement on long, energy drink-fueled drives by greeting us with an enormous burp and, without skipping a beat, the words “What you having?”

“As more people explore outer space …”
Barbara Reynolds, “Sodas, Food, Movies—It's All Refreshment,”
USA Today,
August 7, 1984.

“PepsiCo is strongly identified …”
“It's Pop Politics: Pepsi, Coke Battle Spills Over into NASA,”
Ludington Daily News,
July 13, 1985.

“We're not up there to run a taste test…”
Roger Enrico and Jesse Kornbluth,
The Other Guy Blinked: How Pepsi Won the Cola Wars
(London: Bantam, 1986), 245.

“On Earth, that's not such a big deal…”
Vickie Kloeris, “Eating on the ISS,”
NASA Quest,
May 1, 2001,
http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/people/journals/space/kloeris/05-01-01.html
.

“have generally remained grossly ignorant” …
Friedrich Hoffmann,
New Experiments and Observations upon Mineral Waters
(London: J. Osborn & T. Longman, 1731), 43.

“We must here note and reject…”
Ibid., 44.

“No less preposterous …”
Ibid., 12.

Instead, he argued, physicians needed …
Ibid., 84-88

Priestley presented his findings …
Joseph Priestley,
Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air
(London: J. Johnson, 1772).