Airstreams with Spirits

When they were teens growing up in England, Mark Wiseberg and Ben Scorah talked about going into business together. Fast forward about 20 years, and in 2013 they founded Road Soda with a mobile cocktail bar they created from a 1967 28-foot Airstream travel trailer. They’ve since added a 1968 23-foot Airstream and a 1964 Volkswagen single cab that pops up on both sides to accommodate smaller events.

They move these “speakeasy” trailers around the country via their three Sprinter vans, which double as giant refrigerators. It took them a year to perfect the high-end drinks for the specially engineered bars with frozen-drink machines and dispensers for on-tap artisan cocktails.

Mixologists create custom cocktails by using fresh-squeezed juices, seasonal infusions, homemade syrups, fresh garnishes, and top-shelf liquor. And they are all served up by top-notch bartenders. Road Soda has served as few as 20 people in a weekend up to a crowd of 20,000.

Bartender Ben

Ben, an award-winning bartender whose innovative cocktails have been featured in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, was being hired by liquor companies that brought in famous bartenders to serve drinks at music festivals. It occurred to him that he wasn’t making drinks to the level he was used to doing in high-end bars as they were being served from a 6-foot pop-up table inside a tent. He could do this job better if the drinks were served in a place that was on par with cocktail bars. And wouldn’t it be great to make it mobile … but how to do that?

Engineer Mark

And that’s where Mark stepped in. Mark had been an engineer for Aston Martin, then ran music festivals, and next built large art cars for the Burning Man Festival. Of course, he could build a mobile bar, Mark told his friend, “That’s all the skills and jobs I’ve had rolled into one!” Choosing an Airstream was a no-brainer since “Airstreams are the coolest trailers and have an Americana vibe.”

Build It and They Will Come

Starting with an original 1967 Airstream, they took the chassis off, rebuilt a new 10,000-pound one to accommodate the weight of the fridges, bottles, and filled 5-gallon kegs, and then put the Airstream body back onto the new chassis. They removed the windows from one side and made into a large serving window. On each side of the serving window is an LCD TV screen with curved two-way glass windows so when the TV is off, it blends into the mirrored side of the Airstream. When it’s on, you can see through the two-way mirror, where they display cocktails and menus.

To design the inside of Ben’s “dream bar,” Mark got input from other bartender friends about their likes and dislikes. He looked at everything that had to be included and figured out where it all would be located inside the Airstream. Says Mark, “It’s designed to work ergonomically to be the best for the bartenders so they can serve as fast as possible.”

Shortly after they built the first Airstream cocktail bar, a representative from Don Julio Tequila overheard Mark talking about Road Soda and asked them to come to Manhattan for a PR event. “So Ben and I drove the trailer in a New York snowstorm from Brooklyn, somehow managed to find a place to park it, turned on the generator, and started making cocktails!” That clearly was a success, as from May 5–December 10 they “were prepping, serving, cleaning, or driving to the next festival every single day.”

Here, There, Everywhere

With canceled music festivals and other events last year due to COVID-19, Mark and Ben got into the business of creating more cocktails on draft for restaurants and bars, all made from scratch, selling kegs and draft systems to them.

Road Soda has done events at the top of a mountain next to a ski lift in Utah; at the end of a pier in San Diego, California, next to a naval base; inside Oracle Park in San Francisco, California; and in a tiny town with 50 inhabitants. They have squeezed the mobile cocktail bars into some pretty tight spots. Mark says, “We get the trailer in, we serve a bunch of people a lot of cocktails, and we have a lot of fun!”

Their jobs are also hard work and they’ve had some crazy experiences. A couple of years ago, after catering cocktails for a Memorial Day weekend in Napa, California, three of them drove straight through to New York towing one of the Airstreams to serve 20,000 cocktails at The Governors Ball Music Festival the next weekend. “That means making 200 gallons of lime juice, which is all fresh-pressed. One person’s full-time job for an event like this is juicing limes.”

At one event where Road Soda had their Airstreams and three other “satellite” bars set up serving 400–800 cocktails an hour, Mark says “I was rolling around on this electric hoverboard either pulling a dolly with five cases of tequila or carrying two five-gallon kegs with cocktails through crowds of people delivering these batches to the bars!”

From childhood friends with a dream to successful entrepreneurs, Mark and Ben have good reason to raise a glass for a toast.