The line starts at six. Not because we are heroic, but because the water is coldest then, and cold water holds its bubbles. By the time the kettle has boiled the first pallet of cans is already rinsed and rattling towards the filler.
Cold in, cold out
Every batch is infused the day before and rested overnight at four degrees. In the morning we taste it, carbonate it and taste it again. If it is not right, it does not run. That has happened three times this year, and all three times it was the mint.
“You can fix a label. You cannot fix a flat drink.”
What a normal Thursday looks like
06:00 Rinse, check seals, first tasting
07:30 Filler on, roughly sixty cans a minute
10:00 Quality pull: one can in every two hundred is opened
12:30 Line down, everything stripped and washed
14:00 Pallets wrapped and out of the door
The part nobody photographs
Half the job is cleaning. The filler comes apart into forty-one pieces and every one of them is washed by hand. It is dull, wet work, and it is the reason the drink tastes of herbs and nothing else.
