Robyn Simms, Soda Maker
SQUARE ROOT
WALTHAMSTOW, east london
With their origins in the more agrarian Midlands, London-based Square Root founders Robyn Simms and Ed Taylor didn’t have to dig too deep to realise that the preservative-packed soft drinks brands on offer a decade ago left a lot to be desired. Taking their experience of the burgeoning craft-brewing industry, plus provenance and seasonality as guiding principles, the pair started developing recipes in their cramped home kitchen in 2012, trying out their all-natural soda pop at farmer’s markets before moving into the Hackney railways arches, and then, in February 2019, into a more expansive Walthamstow production space. Anchored around a core range of classics (cola, lemonade, ginger beer) as well as seasonal favourites (rhubarb soda, raspberry lemonade), their range has grown in step with the no-booze movement to include the likes of non-alcoholic negroni and gin and tonic – everything bursting with flavour, and bottled individually behind a playful, poppy label.
“I still really love the moment when you’ve been working on a recipe for maybe a couple of months and then suddenly you try a different iteration of it and you’re like, that’s it: that’s the flavour.
Both me and my partner, Ed [Taylor], come from craft beer. Ed was the original brewer at a London brewery called Howling Hops and I was working at one of London’s first craft beer bars, The Euston Tap. So he was making the product and I was selling it to people. And it was around that time that lots of small breweries were starting to open in London, so we were getting caught up in all that excitement. And then it occurred to me that if you came into The Euston Tap and you didn’t want a beer, your choice was Coke or Diet Coke – and it felt a bit lame in a bar that prides itself on having 40 different beers on tap and 100 in the fridge, all made from small producers with love, care and attention.
So we approached it from the angle of how can we take what’s going on with craft beer – making it with just fresh malt and hops – and apply that to a product that’s non-alcoholic. In other words, what would lemonade actually taste like if it was just made from lemons, sugar and water?
We started in our incredibly shitty – don’t do it! – kitchen. So small. You’d spend a couple of hours trying to juice some lemons – juice going everywhere, everything sticky. I have to say, scaling up, the thing I appreciate now above all else is having a floor that if you spill something on, you can just point a hose at it.
Our first recipe was a ginger beer in 2012. We didn’t start with lemonade, which would have been the easy one, but we got going kind of straight away because at the time, doing a farmer’s market, you didn’t have to be the most professional-looking stand to get some attention. A previous tenant in our flat had left an old painter’s folding table behind, so we bought the cheapest ever gazebo from Argos, went round to our local market in Harringay, stuck a keg of ginger beer on top with a sign next to it, and that was it.
We’re both from the Midlands and came to London to study, met at uni, then never left. But both of us grew up in families that made stuff. Some of my really early childhood memories are of picking elderflower and making elderflower cordial in our home kitchen, and Ed and Ed’s parents used to do stuff like that, so it honestly never really occurred to us that it might be a weird thing to do.
We had people coming [to our stall] every week and saying, this is really nice but what else are you going to make? And we just sort of went from there, experimenting with different fruits. We’ve always been really interested in eating and living seasonally, so we have always looked to what's in season at the time to inspire our new recipes.
At the time, the other soft drinks on offer were so far removed from what the actual fruit or ingredient is, that the simplest way to make it original was just to go back and start with the fresh ingredients. That way, you get so much more from that than anybody else is getting. Because they’re using juice from concentrate, extracts and flavourings, and lots of sugar to bolster the flavour, to try to recreate the flavour of the fruit.
We decided that doing markets was not going to be a sustainable way for us to make and sell soft drinks as a long-term job. As soon as mid-September to October rolls around, people don’t want to buy a cold, fizzy drink while they’re standing outside. So we were looking for somewhere to transition out of our kitchen and off the market stall, and into a bottled product that we could take around to pubs, bars, restaurants and cafes – that was the vision that we had for making it more of a long-term business. So we were incredibly lucky in that we were one day cycling through Hackney, past a railway arch which was full of builders, and we were like, ‘it’s empty – quick!’.
At the time, it was still mildly unusual for people to start a business like this in railway arches, but it was definitely the kind of thing that Network Rail were looking for in their tenants. They were incredibly willing to take a risk on people like us – I was 22 at the time, so it was quite a stretch to convince someone I was going to take on this lease, make a successful business and be able to pay the rent. But it was kind of like right time, right place, right business.
“we take a lot of time to work with the right farmers. we go direct to the source because when you do that, you don’t have to add sugar, preservatives and all that stuff”
Robyn Simms
The key difference with us is 100% provenance. We’ve been doing this for eight years now, and we’ve taken the time and the care to source the perfect whatever-the-ingredient-is for our drinks. So the lemons that we buy are the best that we can buy – not necessarily aesthetically; we’re not that fussy and will take wonky, oddly sized, oddly coloured stuff, but we take a lot of time to work with the right farmers. We go direct to the source to make the flavour, because when you do that you don’t have to add sugar, preservatives, all that stuff. What we’re doing is deconstructing the fruit and putting it back together in liquid form so it tastes like the original fruit.
Sicilian lemons are amazing for our lemonade because they have such a distinctive flavour. In a lot of our other sodas, so that we don’t have to use artificial acids, we actually use lemon juice to balance the drink. So in Italy, we have these guys, both called Carmello, who grow our blood oranges and who have already planted, and soon will also be supplying, our lemons. They act as our eyes on the ground in Italy. They're both about 25 and have taken over the family farm at a time when everyone their age is leaving Sicily – but they’re so connected with their heritage, they really want to do it and make it amazing. We share so many of the same values that we absolutely trust them to source things like the bergamots that we use.
We also have a Spanish lemon grower that we work with – their lemons have a different, more mellow quality, so that is really good for amplifying the other fruit flavours as it doesn’t dominate. They also help us source our Seville oranges.
The ginger comes from an incredible fresh supply source in China. What we often get is quite wet compared to the sort of dry, outside ginger that you pick up from the shop – that’s the result of a sort of dry skin that develops after you dig it up.
Most of the other produce that we work with comes from the UK. We have an incredible fourth-generation rhubarb supplier called Robert Tomlinson who’s inside the Yorkshire rhubarb triangle – I don’t know why anyone would buy rhubarb from anywhere else. He grows us a special variety of rhubarb called raspberry rhubarb that’s an amazing pink colour. It’s got a gorgeous, really sweet, earthy flavour. I think people would abandon us if we stopped making rhubarb. It’s the one flavour that at the end of February people are already emailing us about, asking if it’s ready before we release it.
We get things like apples and pears from Kent, and all of our berry fruits come from Herefordshire. We do sometimes use fruit that has been picked and freshly frozen. It can make it easier for us to process, and it can actually be beneficial for the farmer, especially if you’re dealing with something like raspberries that have been accidentally squished after they’ve been picked. If the farmer wasn’t to freeze them straight away they would immediately go mouldy, so they waste so much less.
Before, we were being approached by farmers who had heard about us and would say I’m growing this amazing ‘x’ and do you want to try it in a soda… So a lot of the time our recipe inspiration came from having that direct relationship with the farmer. Now, because the market has developed so much towards the narrative of people cutting down on drinking or not drinking at all, a lot of the inspiration for making drinks comes from the challenge of taking an alcoholic product and figuring how to make an exact replica but without alcohol.
For more, plus online orders, visit squarerootsoda.com
@squarerootldn
