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
The mate tastes less sweet than the original mate, but is still a great drink to keep you awake.
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'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 enjoy the flavor of kvass - a Russian / eastern European malt flavored soda - but it's hard to find where I live. The process involves really aggressively toasting some rye bread, boiling it with eaisans and sugar, straining it, and then brewing it with ordinary baking yeast in 2-liter bottles until it reaches your desired carbonation level. The end result is really refreshing.
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 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'd be interested in soft drinks that were unsweetened altogether and not just sugar free. Sometimes I have sparkling water + apple cider vinegar + lemon/lime juice and it's wonderful when well mixed.
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.
I love the saccharin/cyclamate combo, but it's actually illegal in the USA. I use ZeroCal from Brazil. If you ever see it in a market in the USA, enjoy the tiny act of civil disobedience.
Saccharin was almost made illegal in the USA, until Teddy Roosevelt stepped in. He liked it in his tea.
The soda industry generally prefers aspartame/acesulfame potassium, as it has the right aftertaste profile to replace sugar.
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.
Shout out to those who love manga/anime: there's an anime called "Dr Stone" that's quite appealing to us nerds as it showcases real life chemistry and physics.
In one episode, the protagonist shares the recipe for making natural "cola" (called "Senku Cola" if you want to look it up) and it's actually apparently very close to the real thing
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)
This is surprisingly close to how commercial soda flavor bases are described in old patents — especially the oil + gum arabic emulsion part.
What I find really interesting is how little actual oil is needed for such a large volume. Makes you realize how much of “cola taste” is just perception tricks rather than bulk ingredients.
Have you tried measuring how stable the emulsion is over time? I’d be curious how long it stays homogeneous without separation.
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.
> I like my drinks really sour, so I might add another… 10 g of citric acid to this batch.
IIRC it's not a great idea to drink carbonated beverages with lots of sugar or acid. Each of these elements weakens your teeth, and in combination the effect is much greater.
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.
Ah, good old Dragonspice.de, they have provided me with supplies for many of my experiments as well. I have many of the essential oils already, I might try this! Thank you for posting your recipe.
243 comments
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.
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-...
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.
This content creator used a mass spectrometer to find the flavoring used in Coca-Cola.
Add modifinil and peptides and you'll have your latest soylent startup.
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.
Sad to hear she passed away recently this month.
Highly recommend Bakto's natural flavors.
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.
Saccharin was almost made illegal in the USA, until Teddy Roosevelt stepped in. He liked it in his tea.
The soda industry generally prefers aspartame/acesulfame potassium, as it has the right aftertaste profile to replace sugar.
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.
> 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
What I find really interesting is how little actual oil is needed for such a large volume. Makes you realize how much of “cola taste” is just perception tricks rather than bulk ingredients.
Have you tried measuring how stable the emulsion is over time? I’d be curious how long it stays homogeneous without separation.
So, I bought these 4:
- DrinkMate soda maker (with CO2 cylinders)
- fresh squeezed ginger juice (not from concentrate)
- fresh squeezed lemon juice
- unpasteurized honey
Mix water + 3 ingredients + CO2. Shake and chill in freezer for 5 minutes while gas dissolves.
Get 400ml/day ginger ale at home - lasts lunch & dinner.
> I like my drinks really sour, so I might add another… 10 g of citric acid to this batch.
IIRC it's not a great idea to drink carbonated beverages with lots of sugar or acid. Each of these elements weakens your teeth, and in combination the effect is much greater.
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.
Tried making it. Certainly interesting! But not something I’ll make again.