Seattle Seltzer Company Is Making Orange Soda and You Can Drink It at Manolin Next Tuesday

Anna Wallace's Seattle Seltzer Company is now fizzing up oranges for your drinking pleasure. In March, Wallace told Eater Seattle that she'd add orange soda to her line once Ericka Burke's Chop Shop Cafe & Bar opens in June (in the Chophouse Row building on 11th Avenue).

Wallace's first soda, the celery flavor, is only on tap in a few bars. It's a popular drink paired with the sandwiches at Rain Shadow Squared in Pioneer Square and poured off for cocktails at Manolin. Next Tuesday, Manolin will debut the orange flavor during their Sneak Peek Orange Soda Party from 4 to 6 p.m. with happy hour prices all night on SSCo. cocktails.

Wallace started messing with oranges while at The Walrus & the Carpenter in 2013 and has been trying to perfect it since. "It's perfect mixed with anything with good botanicals to it: gin, aquavit," she tells us. "It's good with Sun Liquor's aged rum, tequila. The nice thing about the soda is you can use it as a general mixer in a two- or three-ingredient cocktail and it doesn't need to be a crazy bunch of ingredients in the drink."

Now that she's mastered orange soda, Wallace says she will be producing lemon lime, orange cream, grapefruit, and root beer in the near future, with flavored seltzers also on offer starting late 2015.

"I’m always trying to work my recipes into something that feels like it has some history and soul to it," Wallace told us in March, adding that lemon lime was on her list. "7-Up doesn’t have a citrus flavor to it; it’s like sugar and bite. Mine will taste like lemons and limes and be fizzy and refreshing and bright."

Each flavor comes with a bit of history. Orangeade began in American soda fountains in the 19th century, and Ward's Orange Crush originally included pulp to give the illusion of fresh-squeezed juices. Wallace says the soda is a super juicy, bright bev that orange soda lovers will be all over, missing only the metallic note you sometimes taste in commercial orange drink.

Recipe for "Hello, Sunshine!"

2 oz Suze

3 oz Seattle Seltzer Co. Orange Soda

1/2 oz Big Gin

Build cocktail in a Collins glass and add ice. Garnish with a lemon wedge, fennel fronds, and blossoms.

(photo by Julia Wayne)