Craft Soda Guide: Botanical Brewing and the Grown-Up Soft Drink

October 12, 2026

A craft soda is defined less by its flavor than by how it is made. A soft drink can be made by stirring flavorings, sweetener and acid into water and then carbonating it, meaning dissolving carbon dioxide gas into the liquid to make bubbles. A botanically brewed soda adds a step that belongs to beer making. Plant ingredients are simmered, yeast is added, and the mixture ferments and matures before it ever meets the bubbles. This guide follows that process through one English maker, Fentimans, then works through four distinctions on the shelf: how ginger beer differs from ginger ale, what goes into a craft cola, why tonic water tastes bitter, and what separates soda water from sparkling mineral water (shop sodas and sparkling waters).

A ginger beer recipe taken as security

Fentimans tells its own beginning as a story about a loan. In 1905, according to the company, Thomas Fentiman, an iron puddler from Cleckheaton, England, was approached by a fellow tradesman for a loan. An iron puddler was a worker who refined iron by stirring it in a furnace. The two men struck a deal, and the borrower handed over a recipe for botanically brewed ginger beer as security, the thing the lender keeps if the money is not paid back. The loan was never repaid, so Thomas became the owner of the recipe and began making Fentimans Ginger Beer.

He sold it door to door from a horse and cart, in ceramic jars the family nicknamed "Grey Hens." There was no company logo at first; the jars carried the surnames of family members. The dog on every Fentimans bottle today is Fearless, Thomas's own dog, and the company says the business is still in the family, owned by his great grandson, Eldon Robson.

What botanical brewing means

The word botanical means made from plants: roots, leaves, bark, flowers, fruit and seeds. Botanical brewing is Fentimans' name for the way it builds the base of its drinks. The company lays out the steps on its own brewery page:

Simmer. Three ingredients the company keeps secret are added and simmered so their flavors combine.
Cool and add yeast. The mixture is cooled, and yeast is added. Yeast is a living single-celled fungus, the same kind of organism that raises bread and brews beer.
Brew and infuse. Brewing begins, and ginger is infused into the brew.
Wait and taste. Infusing continues for a minimum of 7 days, and the brew is tasted every 12 hours.
Mature. Once the yeast has finished its work, the botanical base is cooled and left to mature to gain flavor.

The yeast step is what makes this brewing rather than mixing. When yeast meets sugar, it ferments: it consumes the sugar and gives off new compounds. The federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), which regulates alcoholic drinks, explains in its guidance on kombucha that the combination of sugar and yeast triggers fermentation, which may produce alcohol, and that a kombucha is treated as an alcoholic beverage if it reaches 0.5 percent alcohol by volume or more at any time during production, at bottling or after bottling.

Fentimans describes those finishing steps too. In a separate flavor process, the company's flavor expert adds water, ethanol (a kind of alcohol used to pull flavor out of plants) and raw ingredients to a vat, checks them daily and tests the extraction by hand. The flavor and the botanical base are then blended. Water and natural beet sugar go in, and then carbonation adds the sparkle. Last comes pasteurization, a brief heating step. The company says pasteurization extends the life of its drinks and that the heat also helps meld the essential oils, botanical extracts and flavors together into a rounded, balanced taste.

Ginger beer and ginger ale

Ginger beer and ginger ale are both sweet, sparkling and built on ginger, and the two names are easy to confuse. The clearest way to see the difference is to read two ingredient lists from the same maker side by side.

Fentimans says its Ginger Beer is botanically brewed using the same traditional techniques Thomas Fentiman used in 1905, and that it ferments ginger root from countries including China and Peru. The second ingredient on the list it publishes is a fermented ginger root extract, which is itself made from water, glucose syrup, ginger root, pear juice concentrate and yeast. After that come sugar, more pear juice concentrate, natural flavorings of ginger, lemon and capsicum (the plant family that includes chile peppers), cream of tartar, citric acid, stevia, and herbal infusions of speedwell, juniper and yarrow. The company calls the result complex, fiery and full of flavor. The tasting notes on the product page describe a pale, cloudy drink with a light citrus top note, spicy and bold, balanced by a hint of pear, and suggest serving it over ice with a lime wedge; the same page pairs it with a Moscow Mule or a Dark and Stormy (shop Fentimans Ginger Beer).

Fentimans Ginger Ale is built another way. Its ingredient list starts with carbonated water, sugar and natural flavoring of ginger and orange, and its fermented component is a set of botanical extracts of juniper berry, kaffir lime leaves and lemongrass, with infusions of galangal (a root in the ginger family) and cinnamon. Fentimans describes a distinctive but light ginger taste with orange and herbal infusions: sharp, balanced by earthy flavors, full bodied, with a slightly spicy finish.

Inside one maker's range, then, the ginger beer is the one whose base is fermented ginger root, and the maker calls it fiery. The ginger ale is lighter in ginger and leans on orange, galangal and cinnamon.

What goes into a craft cola

Cola is a flavor family rather than a single recipe: a dark, sweet, spiced soda colored with caramel. Fentimans makes two, and both start from the same fermented ginger root extract that anchors its ginger beer.

Curiosity Cola. Fentimans says this cola is inspired by traditional colas from yesteryear and is made with infusions of herbal ingredients, including sweet cinnamon. The ingredient list adds caramel color, phosphoric acid (an acid that adds a tart edge), flavorings and caffeine. The company's tasting notes describe a rich, dark caramel color, a nose of vintage cola bottles and a full-bodied, multi-layered taste with warming cinnamon (shop Fentimans Curiosity Cola).

Cherry Cola. Fentimans says it makes its Cherry Cola by botanically brewing and blending botanicals such as ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg with cherry juice, and lists caffeine among its ingredients. The tasting notes call it a deep caramel brown with cherry scents reminiscent of Bakewell tarts, an English almond tart, and a slightly warming finish with a long cherry flavor. The maker suggests serving it over plenty of ice (shop Fentimans Cherry Cola).

Both colas list caffeine, which puts them in the same column as coffee and tea for anyone counting caffeine.

Rose lemonade

Fentimans Rose Lemonade is sparkling, and it is flavored with a perfume ingredient. The company makes it with pure Otto rose oil from the Rose Valley in Kazanlak, Bulgaria, and blends a small amount of the oil with lemon juice. Fentimans calls it one of the most valuable essential oils on earth, used in some of the finest perfumes. Its published ingredients include clarified lemon juice, pear juice concentrate and, again, the fermented ginger root extract. The tasting notes describe a blush pink drink with a sweet citrus aroma, rose that is evident but subtle and a smooth finish, and the company suggests serving it over ice with lemon (shop Fentimans Rose Lemonade).

Tonic water and quinine

Tonic water is defined by one ingredient: quinine, a bitter compound from the bark of the cinchona tree, best known as a medicine against malaria, a disease spread by mosquitoes. A 2011 review in the journal Malaria Journal by Jane Achan and colleagues records that cinchona bark was used to treat malaria from as early as the 1600s, and that in 1820 Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Caventou extracted quinine from the bark, isolated it and named it. Purified quinine then replaced the bark as the standard treatment. The vermouth and tonic recipe covers the legend behind the tree's name and how wine and cinchona bark came to be steeped together.

In a soft drink today quinine is a flavoring, and a tightly limited one. Under the FDA's food additive rule, 21 CFR 172.575, quinine may be used in carbonated beverages as a flavor at no more than 83 parts per million. In a drink that is about 83 milligrams in a liter. The same rule requires the label to declare quinine prominently, either in the product's name or in a separate statement, which is why the word quinine shows up on tonic labels in the United States.

Fentimans calls its Premium Indian Tonic Water the world's first botanically brewed tonic water. The company says the bitterness comes from quinine derived from Southeast Asian cinchona bark, and that the tonic is made with herbal infusions, Sicilian lemon oil and lemongrass extract. Its fermented botanical extracts are juniper berry, kaffir lime leaves and lemongrass, and Fentimans credits those three with the tonic's character and depth. The company says it is best served with a London Dry gin, garnished with lemon (shop Fentimans Tonic Water).

Soda water, seltzer and sparkling mineral water

The plainest bottles carry the most specific legal meanings. The FDA's bottled water rule, 21 CFR 165.110, defines bottled water as water intended for drinking that is sealed in bottles or other containers, and then says the term does not include food ingredients declared on a label as seltzer water, soda water, sparkling water or tonic water. Those fall outside the bottled water standard. Within bottled water, the same rule sets out its own names:

Mineral water must contain at least 250 parts per million of total dissolved solids, the minerals naturally dissolved in the water, and must come from a source tapped at one or more bore holes or springs. No minerals may be added.
Sparkling bottled water is water that, after treatment and any replacement of carbon dioxide, contains the same amount of carbon dioxide it had when it emerged from its source. The bubbles, in other words, are the source's own amount.
Spring water comes from an underground formation from which water flows naturally to the surface of the earth.

Soda water sits on the other side of that line. Fentimans Soda Water lists three ingredients: carbonated water, salt and sodium bicarbonate, the compound sold in kitchens as baking soda. On the label, those two salts are what separate this soda water from plain carbonated water. The company describes it as light and finely carbonated, with no artificial sweeteners, flavorings or preservatives, made to be topped with a spirit and a garnish (shop Fentimans Soda Water). The idea itself is old: the history of non-alcoholic drinks tells how Joseph Priestley worked out how to dissolve carbon dioxide in water and published the method in 1772.

Six bottles, side by side

The table reads the ingredient lists Fentimans publishes for each drink. It shows a pattern no single label makes obvious: one fermented ginger base runs underneath the ginger beer, both colas and the rose lemonade, while the tonic is brewed around juniper, kaffir lime and lemongrass instead.

Drink	Fermented base	Signature ingredients	Caffeine or quinine	Maker's serve
Ginger Beer	Fermented ginger root extract	Ginger root, pear, lemon, capsicum, speedwell, juniper, yarrow	Neither listed	Over ice, lime wedge
Curiosity Cola	Fermented ginger root extract	Cinnamon, caramel, phosphoric acid	Caffeine	Not specified
Cherry Cola	Fermented ginger root extract	Cherry juice, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg	Caffeine	Over plenty of ice
Rose Lemonade	Fermented ginger root extract	Bulgarian Otto rose oil, lemon juice, pear	Neither listed	Over ice, lemon
Tonic Water	Fermented juniper, kaffir lime leaf and lemongrass extracts	Sicilian lemon oil, lemongrass	Quinine	With London Dry gin, lemon
Soda Water	None	Salt, sodium bicarbonate	Neither	With a spirit and garnish

Using craft sodas at the table and the bar

As the whole drink. A brewed soda poured over a lot of ice into a heavy glass, with the garnish the maker suggests, is a complete nonalcoholic drink. The non-alcoholic drinks guide sorts the other zero-proof styles, from dealcoholized wine to sparkling tea.
As the mixer. Ginger beer for a Moscow Mule or a Dark and Stormy, tonic with gin and lemon, soda water with anything that needs lengthening without added sweetness.
As a spritz top. Tonic or soda water can stand in for the bubbles in a spritz; the spritz bar guide sets out the 3-2-1 formula and a zero-proof track.
As a house soda. Soda water with a spoonful of fruit or herb syrup and a squeeze of citrus is a soda built to taste. The syrups and cordials guide explains how the syrups are made.

The rest of the maker's range has its own page (shop Fentimans), and the wider range of sodas, tonics and sparkling waters has another (shop sodas and sparkling waters). The shop is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and online at theambrosianpantry.com.

What makes a soft drink grown-up is time. The base of a brewed soda spends at least a week infusing, with yeast at work and tasted every 12 hours, before it becomes a drink at all, and that time is what puts heat and depth into a soft drink. Read the ingredient list for the word fermented, and the rest of the label starts to make sense.