Four or five things.
That's the list.
Every can has carbonated water, fruit, a botanical, a bit of cane sugar and citric acid. Nothing else has ever needed to be in there.
Fruit first
Between 8% and 11% real juice or purée, depending on the flavour. Then the extract, which is where most of the taste actually lives — grapefruit peel oil carries more bitterness and perfume than the juice does.
Grapefruit from Murcia. Blood orange from Sicily, December to March, which is why that one sometimes goes quiet. Pears from Kent.
Sugar, honestly
4.0 to 5.1 g per 100 ml of cane sugar. A standard cola is around 10.6. We're not going to call that "low sugar" and act like it's a health drink — it's a fizzy drink with less sugar in it.
No sweeteners
No sucralose, no acesulfame K, no stevia. They all leave a trail. With this little sugar you'd taste it immediately, so there's nowhere for it to hide.
No colouring
The blood orange one is the colour of blood orange. In February it's darker. That's the fruit doing it, not us.
The botanicals
Each one is steeped or extracted separately, then blended in at the end. Pepper goes in as an oleoresin because ground pepper sinks and tastes like dust after a month in a can.
- Black pepper
- Tellicherry. Cracked, then extracted cold. Warmth without grit.
- Basil
- Genovese. Steeped for four hours, no longer, or it turns to soup.
- Rosemary
- A small amount. Rosemary will take over a drink if you let it.
- Chilli
- Kashmiri, for colour and a low slow heat rather than a spike.
- Elderflower
- Cordial-grade extract from Herefordshire. Picked in June, used all year.
Allergens: none.
No gluten, no dairy, no nuts, nothing declarable. Vegan, though it feels odd to point that out about fruit and water.