Chapter one
The counter
How the soda fountain started
The soda fountain started in an American pharmacy and it started as medicine. Carbonated water was sold as a health drink, it tasted of almost nothing, and flavour was added to make it worth swallowing. Fountains went into drugstores from the 1880s, and within a generation the flavour was the reason anybody came in.
What sat behind the counter was not a menu of drinks. It was a rail of syrups, one carbonated water line, and a person who combined them to order. The formal job title was soda clerk. Soda jerk was the pun, after the jerking action that drove the fountain handle back and forth.
He was not making thirty drinks. He was making one drink thirty ways.
That is the part that disappeared. The fountain was a narrow menu multiplied by a rail of flavours and somebody willing to build it in front of you.
Chapter two
The bottle
What bottled soft drinks took away
Bottling did something the fountain could not. It made a drink identical in Auckland and Invercargill, sealed, shelf stable and cheap, and that is why the counters closed rather than any conspiracy against them. The milk bar went the same way here, for the same reason.
What it also did was move the flavour decision upstream, into a factory, months before anybody drank it. The cost is easy to miss because it is a subtraction. The last step, the one where a person decided what this particular glass should taste like, simply stopped happening.
Chapter three
The revival
The dirty soda: the craft came back, the dairy did not
The dirty soda is a revival nobody calls a revival. A counter, a wall of bases, somebody building to order in front of you, and a queue. That is a fountain. It came out of Utah around 2010 and spread on a phone screen.
It exists for a reason worth knowing. Utah has a large Latter-day Saint population, and many avoid alcohol, coffee and tea. People who skip both the bar and the cafe still want somewhere to order something, and a cold drinks counter filled the gap. Prohibition did the same for the fountain ninety years earlier.
Every revival of the counter starts with somebody needing a third thing to order.
What changed is what goes in the glass. The fountain worked from syrup and dairy. The soda shop works from a premade flavouring syrup and a cream component that is often coconut cream or a coconut creamer rather than milk.
That substitution is not laziness, it is a fix. Milk splits in an acidic drink and a cola is acidic, so a plant fat gives you the swirl and the softness without the curdle, and it holds at room temperature while it does it.
Both halves arrive already sweetened, though, and that settles how sweet the glass will be before anybody has tasted it. Two things bought in ready to pour, in a fixed order, is a formula. It is not the same act as a drink made to order, even when it is made in front of you.
Chapter four
The format
Flavour drops: the syrup pump in a bottle
This is the whole of the idea, and it is seven bottles. The fountain's pump delivered a measure of flavour into a glass of something plain. A drop does the same job at a fraction of the volume, which is the only reason a rail of flavours now fits in a drawer instead of behind a counter.
The analogy is not exact, and the gap is the interesting part. A pump delivered two things welded together into one syrup, flavour and sugar. A drop delivers the first and none of the second. There is no sweetener in the bottle at all, so a drop changes what a drink tastes of without touching how sweet it is.
The pump did two jobs. The drop does one and hands you the other.
On a can that is invisible, because the sweetness was settled the moment you chose the can. On soda water or plain cream it is the whole difference, and the order matters: sweeten the base first, then flavour it. Which is the exact opposite of a premade syrup arriving pre sweetened and settling it for you.
One drop per 150 ml is the direction on the bottle, and a drink is not always 150 ml, so the glass decides. Open something you already drink, add a drop, taste it, and add more if you want more.
