DIY Soft Drinks

malfist

There's a great book about this if you're interested. Half history lesson half recipes. Check out: Fix the Pumps (which the book tells you is old soda fountain slag for check out a woman's breasts)

s0rce

I liked this video about recreating coke https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDkH3EbWTYc&t=176s

aitchnyu

Disappointed there is no carbon dioxide injection. In the 90s till date in this corner of India, Mr Butler is a compact pure mechanical device which can make nose tickling strong sodas. If I were a soda fan, I would have DIYed and rejected the flat mop water that most commercial sodas have become.

AdmiralAsshat

Last time I tried this...it was alot easier to just buy the concentrate from Cube-Cola rather than trying to source all of the essential oils separately and shear them together. https://cube-cola.org/ I think you'd end up paying less, too. I paid about 20 bucks for the concentrate bottle plus shipping, made 1.75L of it, thought it was fine but couldn't quite replace Coke in my diet, and didn't buy again. Had I done it all from scratch, I'm pretty sure I would've paid more and had a bunch of essential oil bottles leftover, going to waste.

nchmy

I bottled 20 litres of kombucha yesterday with ginger and lemongrass. It'll be very fizzy and ready to drink in 3-5 days. Costs next to nothing and quite healthy - water, black tea, sugar, (gifted and self-reproducing) scoby. The flavourings are what costs most, depending on what you use.

tareqak

Perfectly Replicating Coca Cola (It Took Me A Year) - LabCoatz : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDkH3EbWTYc This content creator used a mass spectrometer to find the flavoring used in Coca-Cola.

oldgregg

Jumps through 100 hoops to make coke... doesn't add cocaine?! :) Add modifinil and peptides and you'll have your latest soylent startup.

nulld3v

I've also been dabbling in this recently in an attempt to avoid buying SodaStream syrups (which are on the BDS boycott list). Tips for working on sugar-free recipes: In some countries (like Canada), soft-drink manufacturers are required to disclose the exact amount of each artificial sweetener they use in the drink. So you can easily grab those numbers from Canadian product listings for use in your own recipes. E.g. 355ml of Diet Coke contains 131 mg aspartame + 15mg ace-K. Also, aspartame can be difficult/slow to dissolve. It dissolves better in solutions with a low pH and a warmer temperature.

mattmaroon

One pro-tip as I now somehow have a commercial bottling license these days: get pre-hydrated gum Arabic. Much easier to work with. Almost everybody who messes this up will make the mistake at the hydrating the gum Arabic stage. Blend it with any dry ingredients like sugar before using. If you can’t source it, I’m not going to tell you that you SHOULD pretend to be a bottling company and ask a gum provider to send you some free samples, but you could and the amount they send you will last the rest of your life. TIC gums is pretty awesome and if you’re into frozen desserts has some incredible gum mixtures for ice creams, sorbets, etc. Also, consider just using water soluble flavor concentrates and skipping emulsification all together. That’s what most pros do and it’s why Sprite isn’t cloudy like it would be if you used oils. My favorite suppliers that sell in consumer and pro-sumer qtys are Apex Flavors and Nature’s Flavors. This probably won’t work for Cola as I think some of those ingredients have all of their flavor molecules in the oils, but as a general rule, if you can buy it at the store and it is clear, it is made using water soluble. If it is brown it probably isn’t, hence the caramel color additive.

peaxkl

I recently started getting into homemade ClubMate production. The goal was to create a drink that has caffeine, less sugar than regular mate and is still tasty. It took me 4-5 tries to get to a recipe that tastes good. Earlier tries involved cooking the mate, which led to a bitter taste. Cold brewing led to way better results. Here is my current recipe for 5 bottles (á 0,5l): - 60g mate tea leaves (coarse) [1] - 500ml water - 65g cane sugar - 1 squeezed lemon - soda water 1. Add 60g of mate to a 500ml bottle and fill up the rest with water 2. Let it sit in the fridge for 12-24h 3. Then strain the mate from the liquid 4. Use a filter cloth or a tea towel (soak with water first) to filter out the remaining suspended solids 5. Put sugar and the lemon juice together into a pot and start caramelizing the sugar 6. Then add the filtered mate tea and take the pot from the stove 7. Now distribute it equally on the 5 bottles and fill up the rest with soda The mate tastes less sweet than the original mate, but is still a great drink to keep you awake. [1] Mate tea that I'm using: https://www.amazon.com/Playadito-Traditional-Colonia-Liebig-...

varispeed

I thought this would be for people who cannot drink commercially available drinks due to mandated addition of sweeteners. I stopped consuming these, any that I tried was leaving awful chemical aftertaste that I just cannot get used to. So instead I was DIY drinks by mixing concentrated fruit juice (with no added sweeteners) with sparkling water. Also be careful if drink says "natural flavourings" - it's a loophole to add sweetener that is not classified as sweetener, so they don't have to put it on the label, but still tastes awful.

SamDc73

I switched to zero sugar about a year ago, but all the zero sugar sodas use aspartame (yeah yeah not proven to cause cancer, but still not a great sweetener) for now (out of laziness), I just grab plain sparkling water and add Stur drops Also didn’t expect to be pulling recipes off GitHub, but I’ll take that any day over those paywalled sites Definitely want to give this a try!

DonHopkins

It's almost impossible to get root beer syrup or extract in the Netherlands, but I found the solution (ha ha) in Darcy O'Neil's "Art of Drink" videos. He wrote a book about soda fountain history, "Fix the Pumps: The History of the American Soda Fountain" (which malfist recommended in the sibling comment), and he gets into the science and history and culture behind drink flavoring. https://www.youtube.com/@Artofdrink First of all you need to make quality carbonated water (de-aerate water by boiling it, carbonate it when ice cold, use heavy cold glasses, don't use ice): Carbonating Water: The 2 Most Important Things To Do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBNJ7yzIvtw Here's his root beer forumula: How to Make Root Beer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIUMFkDV4FE >Making root beer is really quite simple and anyone can do it in about 20 minutes. The core flavour is wintergreen oil and then there are additional complementary flavours that give the root beer its character. He has several videos about formulating cola and many other flavors too: How Coca-Cola Gets Its Iconic Taste https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi8o06qv7m8 The Origin of the Coca Cola Flavour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-1tGNobqi0 How to Make Cola, like Coca-Cola or Pepsi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2yLvseG5UM What Coke and Pepsi Don’t Tell You About Caramel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7CFZAw3dkA And if you want old school Coke flavor, here's one on how to simulate the smell of cocaine: Coca leaf and Cocaine Aroma Used in Coca-Cola https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMcaYtOIbes >Cocaine, or at least the aroma compounds in coca-leaf is an important flavour component of Coca-Cola today and possibly other colas, historically. So the question you might ask is "what does cocaine smell like?" And here is the answer. If you've ever thought about making your own version of Coca-Cola and thought something was missing, this might be that piece to the puzzle. You use the same stuff they train drug sniffing dogs with (methyl benzoate and methyl cinnamate). Also there's another ingredient, truxilic acid, that's extremely hard to get, and is much more expensive ($300/gram) than real cocaine.

frugalmail

I was completely expecting a self-carbonation solution. It's not disappointing, just got a different cool thing :)

amarant

Somewhat surprised to learn that cola recipes don't actually contain any kola-nut!

znpy

Reminds me a lot of this video where the authors claim to have essentially replicated the true coca-cola flavor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDkH3EbWTYc

miguel_martin

I highly recommend art of drink: https://www.artofdrink.com/

jackdawed

I went down this rabbit hole last year after buying a carbonator. Rather than mixing a bunch of oils together, I bought my flavors from Bakto Flavors (based in NJ, USA) which is founded by Dr. Daphna Havkin Frenkel who did her research in food sciences and biotechnology, focusing on vanilla. The cola flavor is really good, and I add acetic acid (Vitamin C) + electrolytes to it. If I'm feeling it, I'll add in vanilla, cherry, or lime flavors to it. Sad to hear she passed away recently this month. Highly recommend Bakto's natural flavors.

delgaudm

This is really interesting. I have been making my own "instant cola" with several large dashes of angostura bitters and a can of seltzer in a pint glass. The liquid should be very pink/orange. and, if I want sweetness a drop of liquid sucralose sweetner is all I need, just sweet enough for me without aftertaste. This mix scratches my cola itch very well and can be made in about 20 seconds.

ChuckMcM

If I could figure out diet dr. pepper this could be life changing :-)