A spoonful of flavoured cream laid on top of a freshly poured soda over ice, rather than stirred through it: that is a dirty soda, and it is the move the Basedrop Builder is built around. What a dirty soda is has where the format came from and six to start from. Jerking is the other half of the same glass: a drop or a syrup jerks the drink, which is what it tastes of, and the cream on top is what makes it dirty. A glass can have one without the other.
- Makes one tall glass
- Takes about a minute
- You need a tall glass, a spoon, or a whipper for the charged finish
What you need
- A soda, cold, any flavour
- Ice, a full glass of it
- A spoonful of flavoured cream, any finish, charged if you have a whipper
- A Jerk Soda drop in the soda too, if you want the soda jerked as well as the cream
- A tall glass
How to make it
- Fill the glass with ice.
- Pour the soda in fresh, from a little height, so it still has its fizz when it lands.
- Leave headroom under the rim. The float needs somewhere to sit and the fizz needs somewhere to rise.
- Lay the flavoured cream onto the surface, off the back of a spoon, or straight from the whipper's nozzle if you are using the charged finish.
- Leave it there. Do not stir.
Why it works
A flavoured cream floats for the same two reasons any cream floats on anything fizzy. It is lighter than the soda underneath it, and thick enough that the bubbles rising through the glass hold it up rather than breaking through it and dragging it down with them. Laid onto the surface rather than dropped or stirred in, it sits as its own layer instead of one more thing mixed into the drink.
That is why the order matters. The first mouthful off the top is cream on its own, cold and dense against the tongue. The soda arrives underneath it a moment later, still carrying its fizz. Around the middle of the glass, where the two layers give way to each other, they finally meet, and that is the mouthful the whole drink has been building towards.
Where it comes from
A soda jerk built each drink to order at a pharmacy fountain counter, a bit at a time, until it was right. The history is in the soda jerk story.
A dirty soda ordered over a counter today is built the other way round. It is a premade flavouring syrup and a bought-in creamer, both poured ready, and the creamer is often an oil rather than dairy. The syrup arrives sweetened, so how sweet the glass ends up was settled before anybody tasted it.
Building it yourself is the same glass the other way round. You jerked the cream and you chose the can, so nothing about it was decided in advance.
Make it yours
- Any soda works: out of the fridge, or off the postmix gun if you are behind a bar. Cold is the only requirement.
- Any of the eight flavoured creams floats the same way.
- Add a flavoured syrup through the soda first, for a sweeter, deeper build: How to make a flavoured syrup has both syrups, and this is the same move with a syrup added.
- Any combination in the Basedrop Builder goes dirty the same way: pick a cream or a foam for the top.
- A coffee or a tea goes dirty the same way: pour it cold over ice, lay the cream on top, and stop there.
Notes
However big the glass, pour the soda short of the rim rather than to it. Ice already takes up some of the room on its own; leave the rest for the float and the fizz underneath it, or the first bubble that gets through pushes cream over the side.
A float holds its shape for a couple of minutes before the fizz underneath starts working it loose. Build it and hand it straight over.
Whisked or shaken, a flavoured cream is fresh dairy with nothing holding it: make it in the same sitting you plan to dirty a soda with it. Charged in a whipper and kept refrigerated, it holds for three days, fresh dairy sitting under pressure rather than a shelf-stable topping.
Allergens and warnings. Contains: milk, from the flavoured cream. The bottle behind whichever syrup the cream is built on is the authority on what is in the concentrate, not this page.