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.
Posts like this remind we how much better it is to be as part of a large trading bloc to be able to easily order/sample these sort of things, rather than it likely being a pain in the arse to get locally.
Well after software I wanted a life that involved a lot less computer usage and a lot more being on my feet. So now I sell beverages via a few food trucks and also syrups people can use to make draft sodas/mocktails. We make everything ourselves because we’re all-natural everything, with the lone exception of Coke products because you just can’t get people to drink anything else.
I basically went from no real knowledge to being able to develop commercial-scale beverages and walk them through all phases of production.
The money’s not as good as software (but decent) and being active rather than sedentary with most of my time has done wonders for my health and mood. Man was not meant to sit in one place for long hours daily and I’m just not a gym rat no matter how many times I tried so I just reengineered my life.
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.
I've never found the right tea leaves. Most of them were to bitter and some had just a totally different profile than the original clubmate. How close are the ones you are using?
For me using the cold brew method instead of cooking the leaves had the biggest effect on the bitterness.
The taste goes in the direction of ClubMate, but has a stronger tea taste than the original ClubMate. I think reasons for that are the reduced amount of sugar and the fact that ClubMate uses natural flavor in their tea extract.
If you want to carbonate water but don't want to buy a countertop carbonator or its overpriced CO2 refills, you can get a ball lock valve cap that screws onto 1L or 2L soda bottles for around $8-16.
That valve will attach to a standard female fitting, which you can put on the end of a hose coming from a pressure regulator, which will attach to a full-size CO2 cylinder available from a brewing or gas supply shop. CO2 refills are a lot cheaper this way.
Put cold water in the bottle with some extra space at the top. Squeeze out the air and attach the valve cap. Set the pressure regulator, connect it to the bottle, open the regulator's output valve, and watch the bottle that was slightly crushed by your squeezing expand back to its normal shape. Slosh the water around with pressure applied for maybe 10-30 seconds. Close the output valve and disconnect.
Voilà. Carbonated water.
IIRC, PETE soda bottles are pressurized to about 50 psi for retail shelves. I don't think they're likely to burst until well beyond 100 psi, and they'll deform before they burst, so if you're careful, you can go a little higher than 50 and make fizzier water than what you can buy in the store. I have used 70 psi many times.
Read up on precautions for handling pressurized gas before doing any of this. Wear eye protection. Don't turn your bottle or gas cylinder into an unguided missile. :)
Sadly, I don't have any info on microplastics released in this process. I wish I knew of a suitable steel bottle to use instead.
FWIW the counter carbonators aren't too bad if you use a third-party refill instead of the expensive branded ones. Also, you can just use dry ice to refill the bottles rather than swapping for new ones. If you don't want to geek out on a complete DIY setup, the countertop models are definitely a little more convenient.
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.
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.
I bring all this up to say that even if everyone boycotts sodastream, it won't do diddly to the actual folks responsible. I bet the same goes for others on that list. Boycotts also don't usually work in general. Most of the time it takes full on government intervention, lawsuits, etc. to change things.
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.
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.
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.
To be clear, it made about 1.75L of syrup, not cola. I kept the cola syrup jug in a fridge for like a year, and when I wanted a glass of "cola" I'd add about an oz of the syrup concentrate to a glass of carbonated water (which I pre-carbonated with my DrinkMate), and stirred to combine.
I used like half the amount of sugar the cube-cola recipe recommended, because it seemed high. It wasn't Coke sweet but it was still plenty sweet for a soft drink, to my palette.
EDIT: Originally said 1.75 ml, meant to say Liters.
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.
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)
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.
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
>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:
>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.
The bit about dogs just gives me nightmares. I picture a few puffs of the dust from that dispersing in my kitchen during that experiment, and then every item then in the vicinity becoming a beacon for drug dogs for the rest of my life :D
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
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.
I made Open Cola once, and hooked it up to CO2 canisters and a beer tap (the other tap had home made beer). It's certainly better than mixing with soda water or using a SodaStream.
The trick to have well carbonated beverages if all you have available is a sodastream-like device:
- cook the water to remove any other disolved gasses
- Cool it down to as cold as you can. A sludge of ice and water is very close to zero °C
- keep some ice unmelted
- carbonate
This is a bit annoying to do especially step one (I skip it, it seems to help bit not to a huge degree) but it helps making very carbonated water to mix with the sirup
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.
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.
Posts like this remind we how much better it is to be as part of a large trading bloc to be able to easily order/sample these sort of things, rather than it likely being a pain in the arse to get locally.
I basically went from no real knowledge to being able to develop commercial-scale beverages and walk them through all phases of production.
The money’s not as good as software (but decent) and being active rather than sedentary with most of my time has done wonders for my health and mood. Man was not meant to sit in one place for long hours daily and I’m just not a gym rat no matter how many times I tried so I just reengineered my life.
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):
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-...
The taste goes in the direction of ClubMate, but has a stronger tea taste than the original ClubMate. I think reasons for that are the reduced amount of sugar and the fact that ClubMate uses natural flavor in their tea extract.
That valve will attach to a standard female fitting, which you can put on the end of a hose coming from a pressure regulator, which will attach to a full-size CO2 cylinder available from a brewing or gas supply shop. CO2 refills are a lot cheaper this way.
Put cold water in the bottle with some extra space at the top. Squeeze out the air and attach the valve cap. Set the pressure regulator, connect it to the bottle, open the regulator's output valve, and watch the bottle that was slightly crushed by your squeezing expand back to its normal shape. Slosh the water around with pressure applied for maybe 10-30 seconds. Close the output valve and disconnect.
Voilà. Carbonated water.
IIRC, PETE soda bottles are pressurized to about 50 psi for retail shelves. I don't think they're likely to burst until well beyond 100 psi, and they'll deform before they burst, so if you're careful, you can go a little higher than 50 and make fizzier water than what you can buy in the store. I have used 70 psi many times.
Read up on precautions for handling pressurized gas before doing any of this. Wear eye protection. Don't turn your bottle or gas cylinder into an unguided missile. :)
Sadly, I don't have any info on microplastics released in this process. I wish I knew of a suitable steel bottle to use instead.
Sad to hear she passed away recently this month.
Highly recommend Bakto's natural flavors.
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.
I bring all this up to say that even if everyone boycotts sodastream, it won't do diddly to the actual folks responsible. I bet the same goes for others on that list. Boycotts also don't usually work in general. Most of the time it takes full on government intervention, lawsuits, etc. to change things.
But I have to say, this whole thing is enough to turn me off soft drinks altogether.
Maybe that's the point?
Those bags full of crystals look like something out of Breaking Bad, lol, but I appreciate getting rid of the sugar and caffeine.
Some sparkling water and some cordials or dilutes has to be ~ better!
Thanks for the reminder to switch!
This content creator used a mass spectrometer to find the flavoring used in Coca-Cola.
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.
I used like half the amount of sugar the cube-cola recipe recommended, because it seemed high. It wasn't Coke sweet but it was still plenty sweet for a soft drink, to my palette.
EDIT: Originally said 1.75 ml, meant to say Liters.
Add modifinil and peptides and you'll have your latest soylent startup.
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.
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!
- cook the water to remove any other disolved gasses
- Cool it down to as cold as you can. A sludge of ice and water is very close to zero °C
- keep some ice unmelted
- carbonate
This is a bit annoying to do especially step one (I skip it, it seems to help bit not to a huge degree) but it helps making very carbonated water to mix with the sirup
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.