What happens when a wine and cocktail maker turns his attention to soft drinks? We visit Rapscallion Soda founder Gregor Leckie at his brewery in Glasgow to find out how he’s rethinking soda, from the fruit up.
There’s nothing quite like cracking open a cold, fizzy drink. But finding one that isn’t full of additives and too much sugar isn’t easy. We’ve always been on the lookout for a proper soda that delivers on flavour without cutting corners on ingredients.
Then we met Gregor Leckie, the founder of Glasgow-based Rapscallion Soda, a soft drinks maker who shares our obsession with flavour and seasonality. With his colourful cans of all natural, fruit-filled fizz, Gregor is redefining the world of soda. Rather than using artificial ingredients or sweeteners, Gregor creates explosively tasty fizzy drinks by building natural flavour from the fruit itself.
Gregor with the Rapscallion team – including his wife, Sophie (left), and sister, Bethan (right) – a true family affair.
This spring, after almost a year of selling the cans across our bakeries, we visit Gregor's brewery in Glasgow to see his flavour extracting methods firsthand. It’s a Monday, and the fruit has just been delivered. Crates of lemons are arriving – all shapes and sizes – ready to be transformed into batches of Burnt Lemon (“a juicy wee tart” according to the description on the can).
Lemons sourced directly from the Glasgow fruit market are carefully washed and soaked by hand.
The lemons have arrived from the Glasgow Fruit Market via a grower in Portugal, but Gregor sources fruit locally in Scotland wherever possible (“let’s be honest, Scotland doesn’t have an abundance of citrus fruit”).
He explains that, rather than negotiating on price, he goes for quality. “I want the earliest access to their best stuff, the cream of the crop,” he says. “If you get really good produce, and understand how to pull flavour out of it, you shouldn’t need to over-acidify or use preservatives.”
In fact, each can of Rapscallion Soda contains only five ingredients, and one of these is water. “We’re known for what’s not in our drinks as much as we are for what is,” says Gregor. “We stripped out all the funny business – we call them commercial shortcuts, but you may know them as ultra-processed foods (UPF) ingredients.”
Burnt Lemon is made with just carbonated Scottish water, fresh pressed lemon juice, caramelised lemon zest, cracked black pepper and raw organic cane sugar. “All we’re doing is finding great fruit, at the peak of its ripeness, and then building either complimentary or contrasting flavours around it.”
Zesting each lemon at lightspeed. The zest is candied overnight, allowing the sugar to draw out all the zesty oils in the fruit. On average, a full batch of lemons takes two hours to zest fully.
He makes it sound simple – but Gregor’s techniques are built from decades of working in the alcohol industry. His education on flavour began while working in a family–run Sicilian restaurant as a student in Newcastle. “I learned everything there, from service standards, to cocktail prep, to traditional techniques around flavour extraction,” he says. He discovered that, based on the recipe for a traditional punch, there are five pillars of flavour: sour, sweet, strong, weak, and spice. “It’s your job to use those elements to create balance,” he says.
By age 22, he was hooked. He moved to New Zealand to immerse himself in the wine world, working in viticulture (the science and practice of cultivating grapes) and oenology (the scientific study of wine and winemaking). When he eventually returned to Scotland, Gregor started consulting, developing new products for global drinks brands. Now, he’s translating all the techniques and theories he learned in alcohol production to soft drinks manufacturing.
Gregor on the zesting machines.
By using these unusual techniques, Gregor gets the most out of the produce itself. “I guess we're ‘low intervention’, to steal a wine phrase,” he says. “The majority of the soft drinks industry uses aggressive techniques that denature or destroy the original ingredient. Ironically, they then have to rectify these effects to make the drink palatable, which seems completely upside down to me. I believe it’s our job to pull the purest flavour from the ingredients itself.”
Of all his methods, the most foundational is cold pressing. “This is where it all starts,” says Gregor. Rather than denaturing the fruit by cooking it, cold pressing extracts primary flavours in all their glory. “When we cold press, we're able to capture the raw essence of the fruit.” The result is a brighter, cleaner taste – closer to biting into fresh fruit than drinking a processed soda.
That’s not to say heat is never applied in this recipe. Putting the burn in Burnt Lemon, Rapscallion blow torches lemon zest to transform any chalky, soapy notes into an intense caramel. “We have seven blow torches at work, and one at home for emergencies,” says Gregor.
Roasting the lemon zest burns off the chalky, soapy taste found in most commercial lemonades, leaving an intense and complex caramel.
The charred zest is then infused, or steeped, in water. Meanwhile, fresh lemon zest is macerated onto raw organic cane sugar, a process which transfers oil from the fruit into that sugar, binding the two ingredients together. “Time, temperature and surface area – those are the big three concepts that we are trying to manipulate in our process,” he says.
It’s also not just the fruit that benefits from Gregor’s flavour extracting tricks. Cavitation involves using gas pressure at very low temperatures to extract delicate aromas from spices and herbs – a technique that’s central to another can in Rapscallion’s range, Ginga Ninja. Here, cavitation allows Gregor to extract bright, bitter notes from cardamom, versus the sweet, stewed flavours created when the spice is cooked (as it often is in UPF products).
In many ways, spice is as important to Rapscallion's recipes as the fruit. Gregor compares his use of spice to the way a chef builds a stock. “Without spice, our drinks would be weak, relatively unbalanced and flat in character,” he says. “There would be no leading edge to enjoy.”
Packed with aromatic oils and a deep warmth, Tellicherry peppercorns help to lift the natural accents of the lemon zest. To force the woody, earthy spices from the corns, it’s added to freezing cold freshwater and charged under pressure.
Depending on how and when he adds spice into a blend, Gregor can also manipulate mouthfeel. Using different techniques, he can create a gentle burning sensation, a more rounded feel, or make spice the final note on your palate. “Spice is a vital anchor in everything we do,” he says.
But one of the greatest enhancers of flavour is also intrinsic to the category: the fizz itself. “The bubbles have an ability to lift nuance and atomise or aerate raw ingredients right before you swallow,” says Gregor. “All the little flavour compounds are released in tiny bursts. So your enjoyment with a slightly fizzy product will be greater than with one that’s flat.”
Rapscallion uses recycled CO2 to carbonate their cans. In fact, their whole production process has been carefully designed to minimise waste and emissions, with all machinery running on renewable energy.
That focus on sustainability, quality and provenance is exactly what drew us to Rapscallion in the first place. “It’s a nice feeling when there’s alignment," says Gregor. “Since we partnered in May last year, it’s been nothing short of electric. You shot us onto a national scale that I could never have even dreamed of, it’s wild.”
The company has doubled in size each year for the past two years, and Gregor expects it'll grow by another 150% in the near future. “We've picked a fight with some of the biggest soft drinks companies in the world,” says Gregor. “We're trying to prove that even on a small scale, if you respect your raw ingredients, all you need is the right techniques to make a lime bitter or sweet.”
For all that ambition, Gregor’s passion is still rooted in a single moment. “From a very young age, I’ve always enjoyed seeing that reaction: when someone drinks what you've made for them, and their eyes light up, and they pause,” says Gregor. “I’m still addicted to that.”
Words by Kate Hollowood
Images by Christina Kernohan
