Burdock & Wild Ginger
Earthy and dry up front, then a slow ginger heat that keeps going after you swallow. The one people either love immediately or come back to in a month.
Small-batch botanical soda · Est. 2019 · Sežana, Slovenia
We brew with actual roots — burdock, ginger, dandelion, birch bark — steeped for eleven hours, sweetened only with pressed apple and a little raw honey. What comes out tastes like a plant, because it was one.
Four flavours. Eleven ingredients between them. Nothing in the list you would need to look up.
01 — The range
Every flavour starts with one root and gets exactly two supporting parts. We have tried more. More is worse.
Earthy and dry up front, then a slow ginger heat that keeps going after you swallow. The one people either love immediately or come back to in a month.
Bitter dandelion root cut with cherries from the Vipava valley. Tart, faintly almond-y at the end, and the one that converts wine drinkers.
Cool, almost mineral, with elderflower sitting on top like the smell of a hedge in June. Batch 214 is back after selling out in nine days last summer.
The closest thing we make to an old-fashioned root beer, minus the syrup. Vanilla and oak from a genuine barrel rest, not from a flavour house.
Hover or tap a bottle — the page takes its colour
02 — The plants
This is the whole ingredient list for the entire range. If you can't pronounce something on it, that's a language problem, not a chemistry one.
Dug at 18 months from a field outside Divača. Roasted for 40 minutes before steeping, which turns the raw earthiness into something closer to cocoa.
Bitter, and deliberately so. Bitterness is what keeps a sweet drink from being cloying — it is the reason our sodas finish clean instead of coating your teeth.
Harvested from thinning cuts, never from standing trees. Gives that cold, wintergreen-adjacent note that makes the elderflower batch taste colder than it is.
Our only sweeteners. Apple from Goriška Brda, honey from three hives in the Karst. Together they are 6 to 8 grams of sugar per 100 ml, against 10.6 in a standard cola.
03 — The method
Roots don't give up their flavour quickly. Every shortcut we tried tasted like a shortcut, so we stopped taking them.
Roots come in with the field still on them. Scrubbed, halved, roasted at 160 °C until the edges darken and the kitchen smells like burnt caramel.
Into 80 °C water overnight. Not boiling — boiling strips the aromatics and leaves you with bitterness and nothing else.
The steep is pressed, settled for a day, then blended with apple juice and honey by taste rather than by recipe. Roots vary; the recipe has to.
Force-carbonated to 3.4 volumes, filled cold into glass, capped, labelled by hand. About 2 400 bottles a batch, which is what two people can do in a day.
04 — The numbers
Per 330 ml, against a standard mass-market cola. We would rather you checked than took our word for it.
| Wildroot | Standard cola | |
|---|---|---|
| Sugar | 19.8 g | 35.0 g |
| Of which refined | 0 g | 35.0 g |
| Calories | 78 kcal | 139 kcal |
| Ingredients | 5 | 9 |
| Artificial flavouring | None | Yes |
| Preservatives | None | Yes |
| Packaging | Glass, returnable | PET |
05 — What people say
Tastes like something a person made. I have three cases in the cellar and I am not proud of how fast that happened.Marko P. — Ljubljana
Bought it for the bottle, kept buying it because the dandelion one is the only soft drink my chef will let on the wine list.Restavracija Skala — Nova Gorica
Too bitter for my kids, which is exactly why I like it. Finally a soda I don't have to hide.Ana K. — Koper
06 — Subscription
Twelve bottles every month, always including whatever came out of the tank that week. Skip, pause or cancel from the email — no account, no phone call.
€2.33 a bottle, delivered. Returnable crate swapped on every drop.
07 — Find us
Bars, delis and one very good bakery. If your local doesn't stock it, tell them — they usually say yes.
08 — Questions
No, and we would not trust anyone who said it was. There is 6 to 8 grams of naturally occurring sugar per 100 ml from pressed apple and honey. That is roughly 40% less than a standard cola, and none of it is refined.
Glass does not take flavour from the drink and a returned bottle is washed and refilled about eleven times before it is recycled. Crates are swapped on delivery and there is a €0.10 deposit per bottle in shops.
Twelve months unopened, cool and dark. There is a little sediment in the dandelion batch — that is root, not spoilage. Turn the bottle once before opening.
Italy, Austria and Croatia, in cases of twelve. Glass is heavy, so shipping further than that costs more than the drink, which is a bad deal we would rather not sell you.
09 — First pour
One email when a seasonal batch is bottled, usually four or five a year. Subscribers get a 24-hour head start, which is the difference between getting the elderflower and reading about it.
No more than five emails a year. Unsubscribe in one click.