How it's made

Fruit

We buy what the market cannot sell: the too-ripe, the odd-shaped, the last crate of the day. Twice a week a van comes back over the Erasmusbrug loaded with fruit that had one afternoon left in it. Sorted by hand, washed in cold water, pressed the same evening.

It is not charity and it is not thrift. Fruit at that stage has already done most of the work — the starch has turned, the perfume is at its loudest, and the sugar is exactly where fermentation wants it. A perfect supermarket peach makes a duller drink than one that would not survive another day on a shelf.

Infusion

Thyme, kombu, ginger, black pepper, honeycomb and vanilla go in cold. Heat is fast and fast is loud — a cold infusion takes days but keeps the perfume of the fruit intact instead of cooking it into jam.

Each batch is tasted every morning at eight, from the same spoon, by whoever opened the room. We write the note on the tank in chalk and stop when the flavour stops changing and starts settling. Perzik usually asks for four days; the kombu in Peer needs six before it stops tasting like the sea and starts tasting like salt.

Time

Between nine days and three weeks, depending on what the fruit wants. Fermentation eats the sugar and leaves structure behind: acidity, a little tannin, a dryness that no recipe can fake. We do not accelerate, filter aggressively, or correct with concentrate.

About one batch in nine fails. It goes flabby, or sharp, or simply flat, and there is no saving it. Those tanks become vinegar for the kitchen next door, which is the honest cost of refusing to add anything that would rescue them.

Bottle

Filled by hand, four streets from the water, in returnable glass. The line runs at roughly four hundred bottles a day when all three of us are on it, which is slow enough that every bottle is looked at by a person before the cap goes on.

Labels are printed on uncoated stock in Rotterdam-Noord from paintings made for each flavour — peach and thyme in vertical strokes, pear in overlapping circles, strawberry in crimson slabs. Every bottle carries its batch number, so you can tell us exactly which afternoon you liked best.

The room

The workshop is a cold concrete hall at Keilewerf, shared with a boatbuilder and a ceramicist. In winter it holds 11 °C without help; in August we open the dock doors at five in the morning and close them by nine. The harbour weather does more of the temperature control than any equipment we own.

None of this scales neatly, and we have stopped pretending it should. Growth for us means one more tank, one more market run, one more street with a bar that pours it — not a co-packer in another country making something that tastes approximately like this.

What we will not do

No concentrate. If the fruit was not in Rotterdam, it is not in the bottle. That limits us to a European season and we accept the gaps it leaves in the calendar.

No preservatives and no pasteurisation past the minimum. The drink stays live, which is why it needs a cold shelf and an honest date rather than a two-year guarantee.