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The real-fruit tier
Nine flavors, all made with real fruit — no artificial dye at all
The one where we squeeze the fruit ourselves. Real citrus, real fruit, agave instead of corn syrup, and no artificial dye. Same machine, same delivery, same next-morning pickup — a completely different drink in the tank.
Five days’ notice, because we prep it the morning of your party. There is a shopping trip attached to every Fresh Press booking, and the mix does not sit in a garage for a week. Five days is what makes that possible without rushing it.
Tell us your date on the booking form and pick Fresh Press. We will confirm the same day.
Every rental company in Austin will tell you their drink is good. None of them will tell you what is in it or how they know. These are the numbers that make “good” checkable.
Here is the part we did not expect. Measuring sugar in an alcoholic mix is genuinely hard — alcohol bends light differently than sugar, so the reading comes out wrong and you need correction tables to fix it. Harper and Finley only ever handle the base, before any alcohol goes in. So their reading needs no correction at all. The rule that keeps two kids away from tequila happens to give them a cleaner measurement than most bars have.
And here is what the arithmetic told us afterwards: Fresh Press needs two recipes, not one.
The base is built sweet on purpose, because the tequila a grown-up adds waters it down by about a fifth and lands it at 13.5. But nothing gets added to the kids’ tank — so that same base stays at 16.9, which is too sweet to freeze properly. It slumps in the cup instead of holding a shape.
Same limes, same agave, less of it. We did not know that until we did the math, and you can do them yourself in the base builder in the Lab.
The kids’ no-dye version costs the same as the grown-up one. We thought about charging more for it and decided that was a bad thing to do — asking a parent to pay extra to take Red 40 out of a six-year-old’s drink is not a business we want to run. One price for the tier, both tanks.
Because you are not buying limes.
We looked this up properly. The ingredient difference between bulk syrup and fresh-squeezed citrus, for one party’s worth of mix, is somewhere between $20 and $40. There is a bartender technique called super juice — you use the peels plus two acids you can buy in a tub — that gets the same sourness and the same lime smell out of about a seventh as many limes — nine instead of fifty-eight for a three-gallon batch. We are going to use it, and we are telling you we use it.
So the extra $125 is not the ingredients. It is the morning spent squeezing, the shopping trip, the mix that cannot sit in a garage for a week, the recipe testing that had to happen first, and the fact that nobody else within thirty miles will do it.
If that is not worth $125 to you, book the Classic. It is a good drink and we are not going to pretend otherwise. But if you are the kind of person who notices the difference between a bar margarita and a mix one, you already know which of these you want.
No. It is the same mix every margarita machine company around here uses, and people love it. The difference is that Fresh Press is made by hand on the day and has nothing artificial in it. Both are real products. One costs more because it costs more to make.
Because fresh means fresh. There is a shopping trip attached to every Fresh Press booking, and the mix gets made the morning of your party rather than pulled off a shelf. Five days is what makes that possible without rushing it.
Ask us. The machine does not care — the two tanks are independent. We just have not decided how to price it yet, and we would rather answer you honestly than guess on a website.
No, and we never will. We make the mix, which is the part with no alcohol in it. A grown-up adds their own spirits once we have left. That is a rule we published on purpose, before anyone asked.
No Red 40, no Blue 1, no Yellow 5. The color comes from the fruit, which means a strawberry drink is a slightly duller pink than the bright one you are used to. That is what real strawberries look like. We will show you a photo before you book so there is no surprise.
The margarita most bars actually make when you ask for a good one. It drops the orange liqueur and the sour mix and uses just three things: tequila, fresh lime juice and agave. It was invented at Tommy’s in San Francisco and it is the reason a real margarita tastes like lime instead of like sweets.
Ours is the frozen version of that, and the grown-up adds their own tequila. That rule does not change.
Pick Fresh Press on the form and give us five days. That is the only thing that gets in the way — if your party is sooner than that, book the Classic and tell us you wanted the fresh one, so we know.
Book your partyOr read the seven rules we hold ourselves to.
We open the next summer’s dates in February and the good Saturdays go first. Leave your email and we will tell you once, when they open. That is the whole thing — it is not a newsletter and we do not give it to anybody.
This one is for grown-ups. If you are under 13, ask a parent to do it instead — we are not allowed to keep your email and we do not want to. Want to follow along instead? That is what our Instagram is for.