The industrial area around Williamsburg’s Morgan Avenue L station is about to get a little more bubbly.
A small-scale, neighborhood ginger-ale manufacturer is moving into bigger digs with plans to ramp up production of its spicy beverage, the base ingredient of which its owner says has serious mass appeal.
“Mankind has an affinity for the herb all over the world,” said Bruce Cost, owner of Bruce Cost Ginger Ale.
Cost started making the ginger ale in the 1980s, when he was an exiled New Yorker running a Chinese and Southeast Asian restaurant in San Francisco called Monsoon. He came up with his version of the drink during a dinner featuring traditional Chinese medicinal dishes. His recipe is a far cry from the syrupy likes of Canada Dry, incorporating chunks of fresh ginger, ginseng, and astragalus, an herb in the pea family.
He made batches at home and continued selling them when he opened a chain of restaurants in the Midwest and found a crowd of new customers thirsty for his product.
“Wherever we were, it would sell,” said Cost.
“It could be 30 below in Minnesota and people would order this drink.”
Cost, who also once wrote a book on ginger, moved back to New York in 2010, and set up shop in a dumpling factory in Williamburg, just a few blocks from his new home.
“We jury-rigged equipment in part of this noodle factory and it grew pretty quickly,” said Cost. “We had to make up the machinery.”
The company now makes a handful of flavors, including original, jasmine, passion fruit, and pomegranate, and the bottles are ubiquitous in fancy New York food stores. Currently, Cost distributes to Whole Foods Market, Fairway Market, and shops in Williamsburg and Downtown. The drink is also a favorite in the Google offices in both Manhattan and Silicon Valley, Cost said.
Before the latest move, the company was making 15,000-25,000 cases of soda per month. The new facility has space to turn out more than 10 times that amount, but Cost says the increase in production will be slow.
Cost said he is excited to open a new factory in an area of the borough where so many industrial buildings have been turned into lofts and art galleries.
“We are employing people, and that’s a good thing,” he said. “It is fascinating what has happened to Brooklyn. It is a center of food production and it has been for a long time.”
