Photo courtesy of Lucky Charlie
Online, everyone’s talking about the singularity. (Is it happening? Will Claude feed on me like the robots in The Matrix?) But at Brooklyn Seltzer Boys (née Gromberg Seltzer Works), fourth generation seltzer scion Alex Gromberg is talking about the century-old machine he newly got on the line at his Cypress Hills warehouse. Founded in 1953, the company operates out of a nondescript warehouse where the water is chilled, triple-filtered (sand, charcoal, and paper), carbonated, then siphoned into thick, handblown bottles by a steampunk-looking, noisy old machine.
In the past, most of Brooklyn Seltzer Boys’ business came from restaurants and bars like Dutch Kills, Lucky Charlie, and Sammy’s Roumanian. But over the last few years, residential demand has boomed. Plenty of their customers are old-timers who knew seltzer was once, as the Goodfellas screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi wrote in the World Journal Tribune, “the vin ordinaire of the tenement.” For the rest, it can be a connection to something past—through wooden crates of hand-blown glass bottles etched with names like Irving Beverage Co. or Riverside Bottling. It is not the most efficient means of getting seltzer, but there’s history and invention, not just a slate wiped clean to optimize business.
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