Brooklyn Seltzer Museum

Located within Brooklyn’s oldest seltzer works, the museum offers interactive tours on seltzer’s production and cultural significance.

Planning your visit

Seltzer — carbonated water in heavy glass siphon bottles, delivered to homes in wooden crates — was a fixture of New York Jewish immigrant life for a century, and it very nearly disappeared. Brooklyn Seltzer Boys, run by the same family since 1953, is among the last operations still filling and delivering the original bottles, using a 1910 filling machine and vintage siphons that can no longer be manufactured.

The museum in their working plant covers that history: the immigrant trade, the neighbourhood delivery routes, the seltzer man as a New York figure, the egg cream, and the decline as supermarket bottled water took over.

The tour is genuinely industrial — the machinery runs, bottles are filled, and the process is explained by people who do it daily — and it ends in tasting, including egg creams made properly.

The bottles themselves, hand-blown in blue and green glass in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, are collectors' objects.

Bookable options include factory tours with tasting. Current availability is shown below.