DIY Soft Drinks
blinry.org283 points by _Microft 11 hours ago
283 points by _Microft 11 hours ago
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 are why I read HN comments first.
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.
IDK if it'd apply here, but there are technically laws on the books in the US against price and purchase discrimination for grocers. It was specifically one of the things Lina Khan was investigating on the way out of office and something I believe she's going to be using for the NYC grocery stores.
A food seller isn't allowed to cut out a grocer because they are too small. However, I believe they get around this today by having minimum order sizes that make it impossible for a small grocer to handle.
That's effectively how my small hometown grocer was driven out of business. The suppliers refused to work with them because they wanted them to order huge amounts of product that wouldn't work for my hometown with 300 people. So, the people running the store ended up just buying products from either costco or another grocery store a town over. The price hike they had to apply was simply too much for the local folk who ultimately also went to the nearby towns to save money instead of shopping locally.
Why did you get a commercial bottling license?
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.
That's a really inspiring story to me. Do you have any more info about your business e.g website or blog? (I realise these are computer things and exactly what you were moving away from.)
What are your, um, favorite gum providers?
Small scale: modernist pantry. Commercial scale: Ingredion’s TIC gums. Their pre-hydrated gum arabic is great.
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
[1] Mate tea that I'm using: https://www.amazon.com/Playadito-Traditional-Colonia-Liebig-...
Love that you made homemade Club Mate! My favorite soda by far. I didn’t realize it was just tea before now. They have made a sugar free version now as well, but that not as cool as making your own
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 by this process. (Nor by countertop carbonators and their rigid plastic flasks.) I wish I knew of a suitable steel bottle to use instead.
I found it cheaper and much, much more convenient to get an adapter to refill the countertop carbonator's CO2 cylinders from a standard 20 lb CO2 cylendar. That way, you can carbonate from the much smaller and easier to use countertop unit, you can service multiple countertop carbonators from a single larger tank, and you can leave the larger tank shut off and away from living areas so that a leak doesn't pose a hazard.
> I found it cheaper and much, much more convenient
Cheaper? I don't see how. We're filling from the same CO2 cylinders, and my total hardware cost was less than that of a midrange SodaStream without the adapter you describe.
More convenient? Maybe, depending on environment and use.
But mine has advantages, too: More fizz, no counter space required, fewer fragile plastic parts, standard components that are easily serviced/replaced, and the ability to carbonate liquids other than water without worry of backspray gumming up a countertop machine's internal components. (Your unit's instructions probably tell you to use only water, for this reason.)
> you can leave the larger tank shut off and away from living areas so that a leak doesn't pose a hazard.
I close my cylinder's main valve when it's not in use, and the two additional valves downstream of it (at the regulator and ball lock fitting) also work, so I think a leak is very unlikely. But even if there was one, I would expect it to be noticed quickly or else too slow for the released CO2 to cause harm.
SodaStream carbonators are super common at all the thrift stores near me, so they're like $5 to $10. There's one on eBay right now for $25 with free shipping. The refill adapter was $10 on AliExpress, but the cheapest regulator alone cost more than my entire setup.
As a kid I built a pneumatic musket with both 20 oz and 2 liter bottles and filled them up to 80 psi repeatedly, and never had one pop.
I wouldn't recommend going that high for a carbonated drink though, unless you like to live dangerously while opening your soda.
I’ve done this for years and never ruptured a bottle, I set the regulator to 60psi.
I’d like a metal bottle too but haven’t found one - I presume spraying some co2 into it would be enough to get the plain air out since you obviously can’t squeeze the air out.
I bought an Aarke (soda stream comp) and a CO2 hose. Now I use one of the 5lb tanks. It's great.
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.
Sad to hear she passed away recently this month.
Highly recommend Bakto's natural flavors.
> acetic acid (Vitamin C)
ascorbic acid!
Acetic acid is vinegar. Not something I'd like to taste in any soft drink.
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.
GCMS is neat, we have a really nice one at work but don't use it to reverse engineer soft drinks. Although, if we had a bit more time we probably could.
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 Googled the BDS Boycott list at a glance...the top link (https://bdsmovement.net/Guide-to-BDS-Boycott) mentions a bunch of companies, including Sodastream. The immediate issue I see is that Sodastream is owned by PepsiCo, Inc. That immediately makes them complicit as well. PepsiCo was also facing a lawsuit regarding a partnership with Walmart for price fixing (https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2026/01/08/walmart-peps...) until the Trump administration threw it out (https://apnews.com/article/ftc-pepsico-trump-walmart-2cd8b42...).
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.
Boycotts definitely have their limitations, but the Sodastream boycott seems to have had some sort of effect: https://www.timesofisrael.com/victory-for-bds-as-sodastreams..., though whether the intended effect was achieved is debatable...
>Most of the time it takes full on government intervention, lawsuits, etc. to change things.
That's the S.
Well done for the BDS attempt ... had to get my Mum to return her Sodastream as she had no idea.
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!
>BDS boycott list
Looks like a great initiative. Anyone knows about a similar list, but for companies that support Russia and occupation of Ukraine?
BDS has been around since 2005 and organizing on a global scale.
Russia is under heavy sanctions so I doubt there's much more regular consumers can do to boycott if they live in countries compliant with those sanctions.
But there's an app that's (unfortunately) named BoyCat that currently mainly works for BDS. You scan a product and it tells you if it's directly or indirectly tied to a product on the BDS list. I heard they are trying to expand functionality to allow anyone to make and organize around a list
TBH this is an idea I've personally wanted to work on for a long time. I think the boycott is an underrated tool for social change and tools that can make it easier to organize around them can be a really powerful force for good
It is wild seeing someone drink something labeled with the irritant, health hazard, and environmental hazard warnings. It also begs the question of disposal regarding the environmental hazard one. I know it's safe due to the doses, but made me pause in horror briefly. (Reality check: Many drugs have the health hazard, or even the skull-and-crossbones. But anecdotally, many of the health-hazard-marked substances I've come across are carcinogenic/reproductive harm)
If those kinds of warnings were required on naturally occurring products, pretty much everything in your pantry would need them.
A 28-oz cylinder of table salt, that can be easily had for $1 at a grocery store, could kill eight healthy adult men, if they each consumed a third of a cup in one sitting.
A five-gallon carafe of water used in most water coolers holds enough water to kill two adult men, if they drank it as fast as they could.
There's a bunch of foods that are poisonous if prepared wrong. I can't find the lethal dose, but a bag of raw kidney beans could kill multiple people. A cassava/tapioca root can kill you too. Eating a bottle nutmeg probably won't kill you, but it might make you wish it did.
Of course, it would be difficult to consume enough of any of these things to hurt yourself, (except for the beans) because we're able to sense when we are consuming dangerous quantities or types of foods, but it's not flawless, hence the need for tradition to pass down how to cook, or warning labels for foods that aren't prepared in traditional ways.
The dose (often) makes the poison.
Citrus fruit itself is generally regarded as fine to eat. Concentrating the oils can make them irritating (and flammable, etc) but that’s essentially undone by diluting them into a syrup and then diluting the syrup into an actual drink.
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.
Oooh that sounds good! I’ve been meaning to add fermented stuff to my diet.
me too, thinking of buying fruit juices and yeasts. These taxes are killing me.
Jumps through 100 hoops to make coke... doesn't add cocaine?! :)
Add modifinil and peptides and you'll have your latest soylent startup.
I liked this video about recreating coke https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDkH3EbWTYc&t=176s
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.
20 bucks for 1.75ml of cola seems like pretty bad value.
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.
An oz is ~29.57 ml (mililiters), so I think perhaps you meant that you made 1.7 l (liters)?
How is the cleanup with DrinkMate? Washing everything was my primary problem with SodaStream.
> Made a second batch of cola syrup without caramel color. It’s much weirder to drink than I expected.
Indeed the 90s were an interesting time: https://youtu.be/2za2IK8FQoM
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.
Fun fact: Angostura bitters has gentian root extract in it, which is also in the northeastern US's favorite regional soda specialty: Moxie! If you like that, you'll probably also like Moxie.
It's also a great way to taste bitters, generally, and a pretty decent substitute for a drink if you're trying to cut back.
Try walnut or cherry bitters sometimes for a similar but different enough to be interesting flavor.
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)
If I could figure out diet dr. pepper this could be life changing :-)
One thing I noticed was: Where's the phosphoric acid? Does the use of gum arabic eliminate the need?
The recipe is using citric acid, instead. The tastes are slightly different, but citric acid is easier to get.
So at some point I went on a loose leaf herbal tea buying spree and bought (and almost immediately forgot about) something called "catuaba". I tried making it into a tea and it was... an acquired taste. In my efforts to make the product more digestible I mixed it with some sparkling water.
The result tasted shockingly similar to coca cola.
So I did some research and it turns out that what's labelled as "catuaba bark" actually refer to a couple different unrelated herbs. But ONE of the sources of "catuaba bark" is Erythroxylum vaccinifolium. Erythroxylum is the coca genus. I have no idea if this specific species contains cocaine but what I CAN confirm is that there are sellers within the US that grow and sell this "herb". Which means you don't have to worry about customs intercepting your order at the border.
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.
I often carbonate my tap water and drink it straight, and have never thought the taste was any different from commercial seltzers. Then again, my tap water is just as good as or better than commercial bottled water, likely because it is mostly from mountain spring and snow melt, that travels down rocky high-flow streams.
There's a Nile Red video where Nigel carbonated water with carbon from diamonds, and when he tasted it, he complained that it tasted like his local tap water, which wasn't very good.
What's the water like in the Netherlands?
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
Somewhat surprised to learn that cola recipes don't actually contain any kola-nut!
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
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.
A easy solution might be to mix the concentrate with sparkling/carbonated water?
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 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!
> aspartame (yeah yeah not proven to cause cancer, but still not a great sweetener)
Compared to what? Aspartame is almost certainly the most studied artificial sweetener in existence, and the safety profile looks very good.
I presume the comment was referring to the lack of greatness in the flavor. Sucralose tastes much better, for one.
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.
I was completely expecting a self-carbonation solution. It's not disappointing, just got a different cool thing :)