Wostok: The Taiga In The Bottle
There's a new drink in Berlin, thanks to Russian influence.
Kreuzberg's hippest new herbal effervescent beverage is called "Wostok". The recipe originates from the Soviet era - and not everyone has immediately become friends with it.
A strange experience, the nose radiates mountain pine foot bath and sauna infusion to the cerebrum, the palate reports in parallel citric acid, sugar and eucalyptus oil. Drinking Wostok flabbergasts in the first line. After one bottle it is usually clear whether you hate or love it. The reactions range from "dishwater, yuck" to "spicy, delicious".
As with all the other drinks following the Bionade hype - that Club Mate, Zisch, Aloha, Beo, Sutherlandia, or the Berlin Guarana energy drink Skull, to name just a few brands of soft drink booms - Wostok is usually ordered in the fancy Berlin districts Friedrichhain and Kreuzberg. After partying all night, hard soft drinks
are needful for one's regeneration.
Wostok (engl. Vostok, russ. Восток) is the Russian word for east, and whenever Joris van Velzen pulls his phone, Moscow's on! In fact, the soda pop fabricant is a commercial photographer with studios in Kreuzberg and Moscow. For 19 years he has lived in Russia and documented the last days of the Soviet Union as a press photographer. He of course had to drink something and fell under the peculiar flavor of the herb-fir lemonade "Baikal". It was first brewed by the now 70-year-old Galina Leontjewna in 1973 on "State Institute of Non-alcoholic beverages, beer brewing and wine of the Academy of Agriculture of the USSR". On behalf of the CPSU and avowedly as a Russian response to Pepsi-Cola. With taiga radix, fir leave oil, St. John's wort, eucalyptus, cardamom, sugar and water.
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