I had a lovely conversation with New York Magazine’s The Cut‘s Edith Zimmerman, who worked it into her seltzer opinion piece. Check out the full piece – Seltzer Is and Always Has Been Good – or read my contribution (and the piece’s conclusion) below:

I asked seltzer historian Barry Joseph, author of the new book Seltzertopia: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary Drink, for his thoughts on these differences and why they’re so hard to keep in mind.

“First of all, thank you for talking about seltzer,” he said. “Welcome to the age of effervescence.” He went on:

“For many people, there’s certainly a drive to try to pin down what seltzer is and isn’t. Anyone who does that, though, comes up against the same problem: The lines aren’t fixed. The boundaries between what is and what isn’t seltzer change, depending on who you’re talking to, where you are in the world, and when in time you’re talking to them. At the end of the day, though, this push to define it — to lock it down — is part of what makes seltzer so great: It’s so iconically simple, and yet we keep bringing meaning to it in different ways, over time, and in different places”

He also gave me a more detailed description of the four phases of seltzer’s development, from its origins in a tiny spa town in Germany up through our modern-day seltzer-mania. But maybe that’s better summarized in his book, which he describes as “a quest to define what seltzer is, learn how to listen to it, and let it tell us what we need to hear.”