The Effervescent History of Seltzer, From the Early Days of Home Delivery to Today's Trendy Cans

A century before LaCroix or Spindrift were refrigerator staples, factories in New York City were carbonating gallons and gallons of tap water each day

Seltzer is a high-pressure business. And you can see it—all 65 pounds per square inch of it—at the filling station at Brooklyn Seltzer Boys, New York’s last remaining seltzer factory, located in Cypress Hills.

On a Friday in April, a worker in thick rubber gloves and waterproof overalls stood at a hulking iron and steel machine, a century-old piece of engineering. He placed one heavy glass bottle at a time onto a spigot on a rotating belt and removed it once it was filled with a powerful surge of chilled, highly pressurized water, straight out of the old carbonator. He packed them by six into wood crates, their siphon heads sticking out like little chrome bird beaks. Each week, up to 5,000 bottles like these are filled and packed in a truck for delivery.

A century ago, New York City was a hub of manufacturing—from the clothing factories that gave Manhattan’s Garment District its name, to the headstone makers that dotted the Lower East Side when it was a Jewish enclave, to the shipbuilding operations in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the iron foundries of the Bronx. In the 1930s, dozens of seltzer plants filtered and carbonated city tap water and filled it into airtight siphon bottles. Today, Brooklyn Seltzer Boys is the sole survivor in the five boroughs, and one of only three seltzer plants in the country.

In a moment where pop-culture trends have a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it evanescence, and every beverage or bite du jour seems to outdo the last when it comes to innovation, seltzer endures as a giddy paradox. It’s historic, but it’s perpetually trendy. It’s natural, but you can manufacture—or even enhance—it without cheapening it. It’s healthy, and its contemporary popularity owes a lot to public health campaigns’ warnings against sugar, but pair it with Scotch or vodka and it’s a sneaky vice. It’s the little black dress of drinks—suitable for any occasion. And that’s all palpable inside a brick building across the street from a car repair shop in Brooklyn.

The origins of seltzer

Brooklyn Seltzer Boys, a fourth-generation-run business, is part of a 2,500-year-long history that’s outlined on plaques at the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum, housed at the front of the space. Here you learn that Hippocrates wrote about naturally carbonated water’s medicinal properties in his seminal work “On Airs, Waters, and Places,” and that spring water from Niederselters, the German town where seltzer got its name, shipped its elixir around the world in the 1700s. The museum notes other highlights in seltzer’s timeline, like how, in 1837, the modern glass seltzer siphon bottle was patented and, in 2015, seltzer got cheeky when “La Croix over boys” was introduced as part of a marketing campaign.

Long before seltzer became a staple in every co-working space and millennial’s fridge, it was a medicinal product.

“Since at least Roman times, people strongly believed that naturally fizzy waters were the healthiest form of mineral water,” says Camper English, journalist and author of Doctors and Distillers: The Remarkable Medicinal History of Beer, Wine, Spirits, and Cocktails. “The fact that its gas can aid with digestion—which is to say, make you burp—was considered healthful.”

But that’s the least of it. As early as the late 1600s, scientists were analyzing the mineral makeup of springs around Europe and recommending waters as treatment accordingly. Iron-rich sources, for instance, were advised for people with “weak blood,” or anemia, English explains.

Marketplace forces took hold once people figured out how to artificially replicate those waters. In the late 18th century, Joseph Priestly, an English clergyman who’s credited with discovering oxygen, figured out how to force-carbonate water using “fixed air,” or carbon dioxide. In his pamphlet “Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air: In Order to Communicate to It the Peculiar Spirit and Virtues of Pyrmont Water, and Other Mineral Waters of a Similar Nature,” he explains how to create water that mimics the qualities in a specific German bubbling spring. In 1783, a Swiss amateur scientist named Jacob Schweppe industrialized the process and sold large quantities of “seltzerous water” that imitated that of individual springs. Instead of going to a natural spa, it came to you—in a bottle.

In the early 1800s, American pharmacists picked up on the curative powers of carbonation and began mixing their own seltzerous waters for patients using sulfuric acid to produce gas. Pharmacies that sold curative tonics started adding sweeteners and other syrups; then, serving the mixtures got easier. In 1819, American physician Samuel Fahnestock received a patent for a pump-and-spigot barrel-shaped device that dispensed carbonated water and could be neatly tucked away under, say, a counter. Over time, the machinery evolved, got more cost-effective, and, in some cases, prettier. In 1858, Gustavus D. Dows created an ornate marble version, a Rococo apparatus complete with eagle-shaped handles, for his pharmacy in Lowell, Massachusetts, patenting the device in 1863. With that, the soda fountain had arrived.

“The democratization of seltzer had begun,” says Barry Joseph, author of Seltzertopia: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary Drink and the pre-eminent—arguably, only—seltzer historian in the United States. He is also the co-founder and director of the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum.

With soda fountains serving as social spaces, individual pharmacists’ recipes gained attention. In 1885, at Morrison’s Old Corner Grocery Store, in central Texas, a pharmacist named Charles Alderton tinkered with fruit syrups to create an elusive flavor he served with seltzer at the soda fountain. Locals asked for it by “Waco,” the name of their town. Today, it’s sold as Dr. Pepper. A year later, pharmacist John Pemberton served the first Coca-Cola at Jacobs’ Pharmacy in Atlanta.

From Jewish dinner tables to mainstream America

“Seltzer” is a Yiddification of “szelters,” the word appropriated from Niederselters, the German spa town that first made fizz famous. But natural springs were abundant around Europe, so how seltzer became a staple on Jewish dinner tables colloquially referred to as “Jewish champagne” is something scholars have made a sport of conjecturing.

The Three Stooges, who made the seltzer bottle a signature of their madcap slapstick brand of comedy, grew up in a Jewish household. Starting with a scene in their 1934 film Three Little Pigskins, and repeated in seven subsequent movies, the seltzer bottle was weaponized. In their hands, it was an aggressive—and hilarious—way to fend off one another’s physical attacks, or retaliate when verbal assaults in a battle of wits were no longer enough. Nothing says “triumph” like rendering a nemesis mute and watching him tumble over backwards after spraying pressurized water in his face at close range. Moreover, the sound of a protracted squirt against flesh is a much more dependable comic device than a quick slap or jab.

In “Give Us Seltzer, That We May Drink: How Soda Water Became a Jewish Icon,” an article published in the journal Gastronomica in 2022, James Edward Malin theorizes that seltzer became ubiquitous among poor European Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side in the early 1900s because it was the only clean water available. It wasn’t required once they assimilated and left the tenements for areas where they had access to potable water. Also, seltzermen didn’t always deliver to the suburbs. “It became an icon for the Jewish dichotomy of remembering historical strife whilst celebrating abundance,” Malin writes.

For Joseph, it’s multifaceted: It was inherently kosher and a healthy complement to heavy food, he says. But he points out the bigger picture.

“Jews moved from country to country and developed practices to maintain tradition. What you consumed was part of defining your identity,” says Joseph. “After World War II, Coke symbolized the beginning of the American century and cultural dominance. Others abandoned seltzer, but Jews held onto it longer.”

Brooklyn Seltzer Boys is the contemporary iteration of Gomberg Seltzer Works, founded in Brooklyn’s Canarsie neighborhood in 1953 by Moe Gomberg, a Russian Jewish immigrant. Before opening his own seltzer factory, Moe was one of hundreds of seltzermen who schlepped crates of fizzy water to people’s front doors, explains Kenny Gomberg, Moe’s grandson and the current president of the company. Each seltzerman had his own branded bottles—typically his name, often embellished with a Star of David, menorah or other Jewish insignia. They’d fill them at a factory in the morning, then head to make deliveries and collect the used bottles on their own route. When a seltzerman retired or passed away, another could buy his route and his bottles.

Gomberg Seltzer Works operated as a production and filling plant. But in the 1970s, business began to change, as people took to buying carbonated drinks in plastic bottles. Immigrants who shaped the city’s early 20th century culture were dying or moving to Florida, including seltzermen themselves, and an increasing number of women were joining the workforce, leaving nobody home to receive deliveries. At that point, Gomberg was under the stewardship of Moe’s son, Pacey, who shifted his focus from delivering freshly bottled bubbles to beer and soft drink distribution. It would remain a filling facility for the city’s dwindling number of seltzermen on through Pacey’s son Kenny’s tenure, though.

Seltzermen delivered to immigrant neighborhoods and beyond in major cities, but the drink only claimed its spot in the mainstream marketplace because of an aquifer in southern France: Vergèze, source of Perrier.

“When Perrier came to the U.S. in 1977, it introduced expensive single-bottle servings of water,” says Joseph. “It came with marketing campaigns targeting yuppies. The trend exploded and opened opportunities in the marketplace. Flavored water all started with Perrier.”

Perrier, the French brand of carbonated mineral water, became a household name in the 1980s, popularized with its “Earth’s first soft drink” slogan and catchy jingle. LaCroix was founded in 1981 by a Wisconsin brewery as the “anti-Perrier,” an indictment against the brand’s hoity-toity image. It was popular in the Midwest, but it would take almost three decades for it to become a national sensation.

In September 1986, the New York Times ran an article titled “For the Great Seltzer War, Fizz Is Fortified With Flavor,” reporting on the novelty of adding flavorings and, in doing so, pitting traditionalists against modernists. Canada Dry became the category leader. Its lemon-lime-, black cherry- and mandarin-kissed varieties left purists uneasy. “The most important question now is what type of seltzer will make its debut next,” Eric N. Berg wrote. “Beverage makers, not wanting to tip off competitors, won't say, but industry gossip has it that peach seltzer is in the works, and will be followed by pear, watermelon and mango. Mango seltzer? It makes the mind reel.”

A decade ago, that once-quiet Wisconsin company blindsided the industry. Under the ownership of the colossal National Beverage Corp. since 1996, LaCroix, quite suddenly, became an object of pop-culture obsession in 2015 with an Instagram-friendly re-brand. The timing was right. Public health experts were on a crusade against sugar, and health-conscious Americans were swapping sodas for calorie-free fizz in increasing numbers. The brand launched a fireworks-display-worth of flavors in cans with Technicolor illustrations that look like a 1980s suburban mall fever dream, evoking tacky Gen X nostalgia brands like LA Gear, Ocean Pacific and Camp Beverly Hills. In its wake has come a clutch of small indie products, like Sanzo, Le Seltzer and Waterloo, hoping to hitch a ride on its coattails. Corporate interests also joined the social-media-ready cavalcade of fizz. PepsiCo developed and launched Bubly in 2018, then expanded its carbonation portfolio this past March, when it acquired poppi, a prebiotic soda—let’s call it seltzer dolled up in haute couture—for $1.95 billion.

In this renaissance of seltzer, its universal appeal is indisputable. “Jews have affinity for seltzer, but it’s everyone’s,” says Joseph.

The big business of little bubbles

The seltzer market has bubbled over in recent years. According to Mintel, a market research firm, the total retail sales forecast for nonflavored seltzer, sparkling and mineral water in the U.S. market was estimated at $1.38 billion in 2024. It’s forecasted to reach $1.8 billion in 2029—up from $732 million in 2019. Total retail sales in the flavored segment was estimated at $4.7 billion in 2024 and forecasted to reach $6.1 billion in 2029—more than double the $3.02 billion in 2019. The introduction of new brands since the 1980s, like Original New York Seltzer and Hal’s New York, and the exponential growth in popularity today is largely credited to people seeking healthy alternatives to sugary drinks.

Alex Gomberg, 38, joined the family business in 2012, newly minted with a master’s degree in higher education administration. He changed the name to Brooklyn Seltzer Boys, moved the operation to its current location, and got back into the delivery service. Today, the company delivers to more than 700 clients. He chalks up the success to the ecofriendly perks, unapologetic nostalgia and an epicurean taste for a more powerful fizz than a can of fancifully flavored LaCroix can provide.

Mention the LaCroixs and Polars and Spindrifts of the seltzer world to the Gombergs, and it’s a nonstarter, akin to suggesting to a third-generation Camembert maker in Normandy that Kraft cheese is worthy of discussion. The issue with seltzer from a can or a bottle is that it loses its vigor the moment you pop it open. Seltzer in a glass siphon bottle stays fresh for months.

Today, Kenny, 67, is “retired.” He gestures air quotes, explaining that he stays busy as the company’s resident handyman. He learned to fix the antique machines from repairmen who stopped by the shop when he was a kid. Now he’s focused on teaching his son, Alex, the company vice president, how to maintain them. It’s critical to keeping the business running. Replacement parts are hard to come by. Specialized mechanics, even more so.

“It’s all about pressure,” Kenny says. “There’s a valve in the head of the cap. You pull the trigger to squeeze out, and when you let go, the valve seals and the pressure remains. On the contrary, with a twist cap, you lose pressure once you open it. With a spigot, the pressure remains in the bottle until the end, you get that massive whoosh of remaining pressure.”

The Gombergs’ seltzer clocks in at 65 pounds per square inch, a testament to the Seltzer Boys’ motto: “Good seltzer should hurt.” Seltzer attacks and bites. Any Gomberg will tell you, you should feel it in the back of your throat. (Kenny says he polishes off a few 26-ounce bottles each day.)

How should I put it? Their seltzer is the punk band of effervescence—a Clash album played on a turntable through deluxe Wharfedale W90 speakers. If you’re looking for the equivalent of an anodyne Top 40 hit to stream on your iPhone, head to the soft drink aisle of your local supermarket.

Real seltzer requires heavy-duty glass bottles that are a quarter-inch-thick on the side and a half-inch-thick on the bottom. The best were handblown in Czechoslovakia in the early 1900s. They’re the bottles that the Gombergs largely use in their business today. Alex estimates they have thousands, many of which have been acquired from seltzermen when they retired, or estate sales. There’s also a very good chance that a bottle that Alex Gomberg packs into his truck today was handled by his great-grandfather during the Eisenhower administration.

“It feels like everyone has a story when they see a seltzer bottle—even people who didn’t grow up in New York,” says Alex. “But we have customers who’ve had seltzer delivered to their home for three generations. The bottles are just beautiful. People really like to have them in their home.”

On the afternoon I visited the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum, Joseph, its director, was giving a tour to a dozen museumgoers, some of whom had stories of their own to share about seltzer-bottle water fights among siblings, seltzermen they knew as children or Friday night Shabbat dinners washed down with bubbles. Standing in front of tarnished vintage machines on display, he explained how local tap water is triple-filtered through sand, charcoal and paper, then blasted with 120 pounds per square inch of carbon dioxide in a carbonator, chilled to 43 degrees Fahrenheit and bottled. The kid-friendly tour, which includes interactive displays that explain the vintage machinery on exhibit and a variety of carbonation-centric comic strips and old illustrations, wrapped with a fresh egg cream, the erroneously named classic New York City drink that contains neither egg nor cream. Just milk, chocolate syrup and seltzer, though iconoclasts argue that vanilla syrup is acceptable, too.

“Yes, once you add chocolate syrup and milk to the equation, there are a thousand different ways to make an egg cream, but there’s not a lot to say about how to combine water and CO2 [to make seltzer],” says Joseph, who teaches museum studies at New York University.

“It’s iconic, but it’s so generic and elusive that you can really read into it,” he adds. “You can talk about seltzer as it relates to health or comedy or nostalgia or identity. That’s part of its power. It’s like a mirror reflecting back at you.”