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.
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.
https://youtu.be/odhVF_xLIQA?t=338
In this case, Pepsi has reduced promotions and increased wholesale cost for "small groceries" which in this case was a regional grocer with ~1000 of stores across 10 states. If Pepsi is strong arming regional giants like that, imagine how the ant of a real local grocer feels. They are algorithmically getting destroyed
I mean, my grocer doesn't sell individual beans either. So why should wholesalers be forced?
That's the key.
I'm not an expert - and have only experience making/mixing liquids for cocktails - but Gum Arabic (often used to add a thicker mouthfeel in sugar syrups) isn't a great emulsifier but needs to be full homogenised with the oils before adding to more liquid - exceptionally high speed, aggressive blending for longer than it looks like is needed, to create tiny droplets which the gum arabic then stabilises, or the oil will end up separating after a few hours/days.
Sucros Esters, Propylene Glycol, or Polysorbate 80 (which I haven't used) probably do a better job but only Sucros Esters could be considered 'natural'
Even to this day many of our paint pigments are mined this way. Red/yellow ochre, umber, sienna.
If what you are asking is the dirt in question geologically speaking a soil? Sometimes, sometimes not. It can be a sediment or a regolith too. But in the more general laymen sense callig any dirt from the ground a soil is not too mistaken.
My ice cream is just ... ice cream. Cream, milk, sugar.
Your freezer’s self-defrost works by getting a little warm and then cold again. That causes ice crystals to melt and re-freeze, which is the opposite of what you want. Gums help with that and that’s why it’s in most of the ones you see at the grocery store.
They also can be used to give body to things that don’t have as much protein, like sorbets.
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.
A couple years back I bought a "cooking from your garden" book that introduced my family to shrubs, and since then we've been making a lot of home made drinks. We mostly do different types of shrubs and tepeches. I've found that doing better than store bought isn't very hard, but I have no desire to try and scale any of my recipes.
The other thing I used to do before I had a kid was make really fancy alcoholic snacks. Super labor intensive, but really good. For example I made a jello piña colada. I'd sweeten canned coconut cream with some white sugar on the stove, add gelatin, and some rum. let it cool a bit. Drain a can of pineapples and keep the juice, use the juice to make pineapple jello again mixed with rum, with a piece of pineapple in the middle. Join the two jellos when they are both half set. (I used silicone molds.)
Tada! Bougie piña colada jello shots.
With a kid now I am limiting my creativity to non-alcoholic drinks. 90% of the shrub recipes online are absurdly basic. Honestly doing "better than average" is easy because the bar is so damn low.
gotta say I don't like Pepsi, but I love Jarritos Cola and Fritz-Kola, they're both bitter enough. Most other Colas I've had in the U.S are too darn sweet.
I guess a big part of this is figuring out how to make money doing that. I wonder how did you get there.
I've always had the desire to make soft drinks and I have a similar concern about how we are sitting the entire day...
Oh man, that's so me at this stage of my life. But I cannot easily get out of the rat race, with family responsibilities and mortgages and all...
Nature’s flavors sells both extracts and concentrates that are water soluble. For a brown soda, like rootbeer, is an alcohol based extract preferred or should I go the concentrate route?
I’ve been toying with the idea of making commercial style rootbeer at home, and making soda from roots just doesn’t cut it (even if it’s pretty good). I’ve been eying Nature’s flavors for a while, but since I’m not in the US it will be VERY expensive.
There are no domestics providers of food safe wintergreen or sassafras.
Thanks, and cool career switch!
Alcohol is great for extracting as it can pull out both.
The flavor extracted depends on what you’re extracting with and even the concentration.
So really, you’d have to buy it and try. I’ve only ever made root beer a couple times for my own experimentation with oil.
Nature’s Flavors is awesome though and you might ask them.
A neat trick, even if nobody cared.
The Science Behind Crystal Pepsi: Microemulsion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppufxi1pHu8
>If you've ever asked the question: How do they make Crystal Pepsi clear? Here is your answer. The method is surprisingly simple and uses a technique to make a microemulsion where the droplet size of the flavour oil is around 1 micron. This method comes directly from Pepsi, via a patent they filed in 1989, providing a detailed method for producing oil-in-water microemulsions for beverages. The patent specifically discusses clear colas and methods for producing the same.
>This video is an introduction to creating microemulsions and provides a process for doing it at home with simple equipment and easily available ingredients.
Also:
Emulsion FAQ (Beverages)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRf4ehRPpok
Stable Flavour Emulsion for Soda Syrups and Non Alcoholic Drinks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYToDpVAeMU
Caramel Colouring, Flavouring and Emulsifying Syrup
Presumably it's because they changed to use flavors that are completely water-soluble. That would explain a difference in taste.
(I know they tasted different with my eyes open, but I never did a blind taste test between the two. It would be interesting to know how close they really got to the original flavor.)
Also, he said that he's somehow stumbled into somehow having a commercial bottling license. If him, why not us?
It’s immaterial to Apple if I stole an iPhone from the Apple Store too.
> Also, he said that he's somehow stumbled into somehow having a commercial bottling license. If him, why not us?
Because he is a commercial bottler who is sampling from different supplier that he intends to source from for his business.
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-...
Edit: My bad, I didn't realise that was for 5 bottles. Carry on.
But nowadays I just drink plain yerba mate with a splash of lemon juice, no added sugar. I do the FreeMate in summer a bit.
Edit: Btw, if anyone of you bought yerba mate before and thought it didn't taste great, for me personally there are huge differences between them. I like the milder ones a lot more that don't have much powder. If you have been disappointed before maybe try again with a different brand and don't forget the splash of lemon juice, that makes a crazy big difference
That version (Club Mate Zero) is hard to get in supermarkets as well, at least where I’m living in Germany. I usually order it online.
Why not do it with the leaves? This is harder as their taste profile is very uneven.
For the sour taste, add citric acid.
I'm pretty sure that if you toy around with the amount of citric acid, sugar & dillution you'll get a similar taste, or something even more palatable for you.
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 by this process. (Nor by countertop carbonators and their rigid plastic flasks.) I wish I knew of a suitable steel bottle to use instead.
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. Even if there was one, I would expect it to be noticed quickly or else too slow for the released CO2 to cause harm.
You could probably get them to work on a DIY setup with the right pressure regulator settings and the right adapter. But I'd like to avoid the flying glass shards if I get it wrong
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.
Thanks for the link. This gives me a direction worth investigating, at least.
https://www.kegoutlet.com/prod_images/xlarge/2/0/SP202T-SS.a...
Disconnects with the head and can be shaken dissolving more gas.
Also since the head is detachable, the worst that can happen after something foaming the nozzle I 5 second rinse in the cold water.
Don't like the company, love the product.
I wouldn't recommend going that high for a carbonated drink though, unless you like to live dangerously while opening your soda.
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.
This starts a conversation more effectively with contacts rather than go full large company avoidance which is difficult for people to imagine, let alone act on.
I sympathise with what you're saying though.
https://bdsmovement.net/what-bds
Effective boycotts work on companies that are large enough to be noticed but small enough for boycotts to have an effect, while divestments and sanctions can be lobbied for larger institutions and governments.
I think just saying something like "why not just boycott all huge corporations/organisations?" can be a bit disingenuous when I think it's pretty well acknowledged that We Live In A Society that makes completely separating yourself from large corporations essentially isolate you from society as a whole
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.
Call it for what it really is (not you, Times Of Israel). A factory inside an illegal West Bank settlement.
Personally, I find it's less about the act (although financially depriving companies of my cash does make me feel good), it's about the conversation the act starts.
And I've seen it work, or help. Some among us will remember the boycott of South African goods during Apartheid.
That's the S.
> We must strategically focus on a relatively smaller number of carefully selected companies and products for maximum impact.
My intentionally pick companies that are large enough to be noticable but small enough that they could actually achieve something with the amount of support they have.
If you look the other two letters of "BDS", divestment and sanctions are the strategies for larger institutions and government interventions
Can you share some links? Neither amazon.ca nor walmart.ca seem to show this.
Looks like a great initiative. Anyone knows about a similar list, but for companies that support Russia and occupation of Ukraine?
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
If you do this you also benefit from giving your money to real people and not contributing to huge amounts of waste and pollution.
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!
My only challenge is controlling the gassiness - it’s so vigorous that the moment I even slightly open the cap the whole thing fizzes up like crazy - opening it normally would result in a kvass fountain shooting up like 30cm. :)
By Russian standards, this is "non-alcoholic".
Combine ginger + sugar + water in a quart jar. Let it sit for 3-7 days, covered but open, at room temp. Will stary to bubble. These are your live ginger yeasties, or ginger bug.
Boil a big batch of ginger tea (more ginger + sugar + water). Cool to <100F, add ginger bug. Strain. Bottle in plastic bottles (glass explodes on me sometimes). Ready in 3-7 days. Gets boozy if you leave it out longer.
Add a little citric acid and/or lemon juice at tea step to give it a little acid to counteract the funk.
Kefir is easier and quicker to make than kombucha, there is no caffeine and maybe less sugar. Probably the best intro to fermented drinks!
One is a couple of squirts of vanilla, a couple of squirts of lemon juice, and a bit of salt. Salt is probably an underappreciated drink ingredient for this sort of thing. It turns out it isn't in your soft drinks just to make you want to drink more. This makes something that is related to cream soda, except for the aspects of cream soda that come from being crammed full of sugar, which I can't do much about.
I also have a mix I keep around made out of 3 tablespoons salt, 1 cup vanilla, 1/2 cup lemon juice, 1/2 cup lime juice, and about 1/3rd cup almond extract. I measure it all (except the salt which I just put in directly) into a single 2 cup Pyrex dish and just sort of eyeball the last 1/3rd cup of almond extract, then funnel it in to a holder. I use McCormick 32 oz vanilla and almond extract for this and order bulk RealLemon and RealLime juice for this from Amazon, and mix it into one of the leftover bottles and keep it around refrigerated. 3 squirts and "whatever dribbles in" as I'm removing the bottle is what I used for one DrinkMate bottle. To taste, as all of this is, of course. If nothing else this is pretty cheap per drink.
You can also mix unsweetened electrolytes in, but you have to wait until after you dilute the mixture with water or it'll react with the lemon & lime juice. Salt you can keep in the mix but not electrolytes in general. It adds a certain body to the mix even if you're not interested in the electrolytes per se, and a single packet of them lasts a long time.
You're not going to go into business selling this stuff, but if you're already drinking unsweetened apple cider vinegar & lemon/lime juice as a beverage flavoring we might just have some compatible tastes here. Carbonation is required, though, otherwise the vanilla and the almond extract don't come through at all.
Sad to hear she passed away recently this month.
Highly recommend Bakto's natural flavors.
ascorbic acid!
In the mean time, does anyone know the formula for traditional Irn-Bru? How do you get the girders to dissolve into the syrup?
RARE Irn-Bru Advertising Poster/Calendar 1992 Demand Going to be Wee Bit Heavier
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/374619031624
Irn Bru - "Made in Scotland from Girders" - Drilled Hole
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoVfy_q9IFc
Irn Bru Advert - "Made in Scotland from Girders" - Steam Roller
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD3LippIN40
Irn Bru Advert: Shipyard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBjYfe-QIBg
IRN-BRU Snowman Advert
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yZOab5gl-4
IRN-BRU Snowman - The Sequel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8WBStu4STY
ROYALS: The Queen and Prince William visit the Irn-Bru factory | 5 News
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QU-0n1m-2OE
At 1:08 they hold up a precious bottle of pure secret Irn-Bru Essence. How can I get me some of that?
I know there are hacks for the older sodastreams where you can buy a large tank from a foodgas company, but what I really want is a machine in my house that I can bring a cup to and fill with soda without it costing me ~$1,000.
If you really want a faucet that dispenses carbonated water, the cheapest method is to buy just the part of a commercial machine that does the carbonating. It consists of a high-pressure tank with a carbonated water output, and separate water and CO2 tank inputs, as well as a pump that pressurizes the input water, to match the CO2 pressure, so that the water can enter the tank.
If you search Craigslist or eBay for "carbonator with pump" you can usually find something for ~$200. Throw in another ~$100 for a used tank, regulator, and faucet, and you can get a 1920's style seltzer fountain in your own home, then add syrups if you want flavored sodas, or throw in some milk and chocolate syrup and call it an egg cream, despite it containing neither.
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.
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.
Cyclamate is banned in the US based on a flawed 1969 study that supposedly showed it to be carcinogenic. It's legal in most of the world, including the EU.
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.
You know it's getting serious when they science it, using a mass spectrometer. And then keep at it for a year through many experiments that did not produce a result. That attitude of "the experiment didn't fail, it successfully eliminated one of the possibilities" is very scientific.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tried making it. Certainly interesting! But not something I’ll make again.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The carbonated water and lemon in water make for an acidic liquid. This is nice when it is hot, but it is also bad for teeth. So I do try to limit these somewhat, never drink it right before brushing, brush 2x a week, and floss with those special toothpicks. I also drink the acidic stuff with the main meal in evening when the teeth already get a blast from the meal, regularly at least.
As a former wine drinker (who can also appreciate special beers and heavy liquor) I was not able to stick to one beer on friday evening, and I recognized the struggle to battle an addiction, being an alcoholic in disguise. I've been sober past years, approx 4, apart from an occasional mistake due to alcohol in a desert or an intentional tiramisu during Christmas.
I also still drink coffee, but with caffeine not so much. Mainly in morning/afternoon. As a kid I was a fan of cola, the coca cola one (for some reason never liked other ones like Aldi's or Pepsi much; there's a lot of choice these days). Club Mate is a bit hard to source and the pfand is annoying (justified, but...) to send back from NL. But I been able to quit that in puberty. So, while I like cheap/bulk, I am not sure what I could gain from DIY soda (the carbonated water is cheap and we get the groceries at the doorstep, also useful since we don't have a car).
- 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
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!
Compared to what? Aspartame is almost certainly the most studied artificial sweetener in existence, and the safety profile looks very good.
I hate those stupid sugar alcohols, and stevia as well. Yuck.
