Berlin, Germany (Gastrosofie). An e-mail arrived in the editorial office a few days ago. Jacob Voelkel had „now developed three products with his team“ that would „represent a new level in terms of taste“ when it comes to oat drinks. You should come to a café in Berlin one afternoon and taste them.
The Voelkeljuice-invitation of 5 January 2023 also says: „When we presented Germany’s first oat drink in returnable glass bottles at Biofach in 2020, we never expected that we would generate 25 percent of our turnover with plant drinks in a very short time. More than 250,000 environmentally friendly bottles now leave our factory in Wendland every month! Despite the gigantic success, we still have the ambition to continuously make our oat drinks better.“
For my taste, this might have been successful with one of the three new varieties. In any case, the „fresh oat drink with calcium-rich red algae, Demeter, 980 ml in a returnable glass, RRP 2.79 euros“ at Café Holzmarktperle tastes better to me than I had previously suspected. It’s true, I couldn’t warm up to classic oats in the short time at the Café an der Spree, even though it was bitterly cold outside, and I don’t really want to get used to an oat drink as a substitute for pasture milk with the one or other coffee speciality.
Others might succeed better in the presence of Jacob and Jurek Voelkel, so that „Oat Drink Barista, organic, 980 ml in a returnable glass, RRP 2.79 euros“ also fits into some cups and even a pot of coffee. There were no pots of coffee, but one or two coffee specialities such as café au lait, caffè latte, cappuccino. Those who took their coffee with them into the cold of Berlin had iced coffee at Holzmarkt in no time. Great! No waiter can deliver so quickly, at least none in the centre of the metropolis, where no cow has been milked or slaughtered for a long time, no oats grow, but grass does.
This is a good thing, just as healthy drinks and sustainable management are not only in the Wendland region, where „responsibility for people and nature“ is written in capital letters in the manufactory called Naturkostsafterei. At Voelkel, the dream has become a tradition. It seems that the beautiful, the good and the true are being lived in the fourth generation. We gastrosophists from GASTROSOFIE magazine would like to see this for ourselves, to take a look at the cultivation of the oats, the fields with vegetables and meadows with fruit, as well as the production in the factory. Let’s go to Höhbeck, toast with an oat drink and try them all. Ho Ho Ho Oat Drink from and with Voelkel!
