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.

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-...

• BoredPositron

  today at 9:10 PM

  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?

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.

• toast0

  today at 7:21 PM

  20 bucks for 1.75ml of cola seems like pretty bad value.

  • AdmiralAsshat

    today at 7:27 PM

    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.

    • today at 7:35 PM

    • gryfft

      today at 7:35 PM

      An oz is ~29.57 ml (mililiters), so I think perhaps you meant that you made 1.7 l (liters)?

    • IanCal

      today at 7:36 PM

      Do you mean L? ml to me would be millilitres and one fluid ounce is ~30ml.

      • AdmiralAsshat

        today at 7:53 PM

        Yes, typo on my side. Thanks for catching!

    • today at 7:36 PM

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

Jumps through 100 hoops to make coke... doesn't add cocaine?! :)

Add modifinil and peptides and you'll have your latest soylent startup.

It's almost impossible to get root beer syrup or extract in the Netherlands, but I found 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", and gets into the science behind drink flavoring.

https://www.youtube.com/@Artofdrink

Here's his root beer forumla:

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:

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 here's one on how to simulate the taste 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.

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)

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.

• _Microft

  today at 6:57 PM

  A easy solution might be to mix the concentrate with sparkling/carbonated water?

• atombender

  today at 7:02 PM

  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.

  • quobnk

    today at 7:40 PM

    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

    • atombender

      today at 8:02 PM

      Nice, I will have to try that!

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.

• LightBug1

  today at 8:52 PM

  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!