How it's made
Four steps, one of which is waiting.
Everything we make is pressed cold, infused whole and left alone for weeks in a cold room beside the Maas. There is no concentrate, no flavouring and no heat anywhere in the process — which makes the drinks better and the company slower.
The method
01
Fruit
We buy from four growers within ninety kilometres of Rotterdam and take whatever the week gives. Fruit arrives in crates, unwashed and uneven, and is sorted by hand on the same table it has been sorted on since 2019. Anything that would need sugar to taste like itself is refused, which means some weeks we press half of what we planned and some weeks nothing at all.
02
Infusion
Juice is pressed cold and moved straight into steel. Herbs, roots, peel and — in one case — seaweed go in whole, never as extract. There is no heat at any point; heat is fast, and fast tastes like syrup. The infusion is stirred once a day by hand and tasted twice, morning and evening, by whoever opened the door that day.
03
Time
Between three and six weeks, depending on the batch and the weather. This is the part that cannot be bought or shortened. The liquid loses its edges, the botanicals stop announcing themselves, and one morning it is simply finished. We have thrown away batches that were nearly there; the nearly is the whole problem.
04
Bottle
Filled and capped in small runs of nine hundred, unpasteurised, with the batch number written by hand on the back label. Every bottle is non-alcoholic. Bottles are cooled overnight before they leave the room, then packed in moulded pulp — no plastic, no void fill, no printed marketing insert.
The longer version.
Embra began in a rented cold room behind a fishmonger on the Maashaven, with one press, two tanks and a habit of buying fruit that was too ripe to sell. The first batches were made for friends and were, by any commercial standard, a failure: unstable, unpredictable, different every fortnight. They were also the first drinks any of us had made that tasted like a specific week of a specific year, and that turned out to be the thing worth keeping.
The method has barely changed since. We press cold, infuse cold, and wait. Cold pressing keeps the aromatics that heat would drive off in minutes, and it keeps the colour honest — the peach in PERZIK is the colour of peaches, not of a dye that survives pasteurisation. The cost of that decision is shelf life, so we accept a short one and plan the whole company around it instead of engineering it away.
Botanicals go in whole because whole ingredients release slowly. Thyme cut in the morning is in the tank by noon; kombu is rinsed once and dropped in by hand; vanilla arrives as pods, one per batch, and is split with a knife rather than metered as a paste. Nothing is standardised to a target flavour profile, which is why the same bottle changes slightly between batches and why the batch number matters enough to write by hand.
Waiting is the only step with no shortcut, and it is the one that shapes the business. Three to six weeks of tank time means capital sitting still, in a cold room, doing nothing visible. It also means we cannot respond to a good month by making more that month. When a bottle is sold out, it is genuinely sold out — the next one is already in a tank, and it will be ready when it is ready.
We bottle unpasteurised in runs of nine hundred, which is roughly what two people can fill, cap, label and cool in a single day without hurrying. Nothing is filtered bright; a little sediment is normal and is a sign the drink was left alone. Bottles ship cold, in moulded pulp, from the same room they were filled in.
None of this is a story about craft for its own sake. Fruit, water, time and one idea per bottle is simply the shortest route we have found to a drink with no alcohol in it that still deserves a glass and a pause. Everything else — the peel, the pepper, the pod — is there to make the fruit sound more like itself.
Nine hundred bottles, written on by hand.