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Open Cola

en.wikipedia.org

31–40 of 67 posts

Re: Open Cola

#31
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given you drink diet sodas, you must care about your health, but drinking diet sodas is more unhealthy than coffee. For one, you're clearly concerned about sugar intake (and you should be), but you see one problem with our sugar intake is that it makes our taste buds tolerant to sugar, so in time it dulls our senses for fruits or milk or other healthy foods with naturally occurring sugar. And the problem is that arti…

My advice is to learn to enjoy plain soda water – it's my absolute favourite beverage for fine dining as it's fundamentally refreshing and cleanses the palate. It means you enjoy the food more without getting weighed down by liquid sugar or alcohol. If it's not to your taste, one way to make unsweetened soda water substantially more palatable is to add lemon juice. A particularly convenient way to do this is to use b…

I totally agree. I've been heavily drinking La Croix sparkling water when I crave a soda and I've never been more hydrated!

Re: Open Cola

#32
post #2

I'm actually dreading the day that I go to the store and find that my favorite soda syrups have been discontinued. I prefer diet sodas over coffee for my daily caffeine intake. I started using a SodaStream a couple years ago, and I've come to really enjoy a few of the flavors that they offer, but some of them are already completely impossible to get anymore. This seems mostly due to them being acquired by Pepsi, and…

I really disliked their diet flavors, and most of the non-diet ones. I managed to find a great rootbeer syrup from someone else, but it still had sugar.

Now, I usually either go for an energy drink syrup if I want caffeine (Mio or Power Ade have some good ones) or Koolaid liquid for no-sugar no-caffeine. I make them much stronger than my wife likes, but that's just another feature... You can customize the taste a lot.

Losing your favorite flavors sucks, but the silver lining is that it pushed me to look for other flavors, and I definitely found some that I liked.

Re: Open Cola

#34

This is such a cool idea. Since distribution is the real secret behind the success of Coca Cola and the beverage giants, I bet this would pair well with a Dollar Shave Club type of business model. Deliver a crate of Open Cola to people every month. Undercut the outrageous markups the big guys apply to fizzy sugar water in order to maintain their distribution monopoly. Pass the savings along to the customer. Heavy col…

If you shake a bottle and let it rest, it will "unshake" itself. So that is not really the problem.

The problem is people are religious about their Cola and basically nobody has managed to convince consumers that theirs taste as good as the big brand.

There are plenty of very cheap store brand cokes available in stores, none of them have managed to compete with Coca Cola.

Re: Open Cola

#35

> 2.36 kg plain granulated white table sugar http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2015/sugar-guid...

Let's see: 2.36 kg of sugar makes enough syrup for 24L of OpenCola, according to the wiki article. So, 12oz of OpenCola contains 34.9 grams of sugar [1]. 4 grams less than the equivalent amount of Coke [2].

Not to say that this isn't still a lot of sugar, just that it's comparable to the product it's trying to emulate.

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=solve+for+x:+2.36+kg+%2... [2] http://www.coca-colaproductfacts.com/en/coca-cola-products/c...

Re: Open Cola

#36

The picture on the wikipedia page makes it look very sickly compared to any other cola. It looks like cloudy tea and there's no visible carbonation.

You can adjust that if you make it. When I made it, I didn't put any caramel coloring in it, and it came out cloudy white. As far as carbonation, mine was WAY more carbonated than store bought soda, I was carbonating it to 50psi in the bottles, and shaking up and recarbonating until it wouldn't take any more carbonation. Then I'd let it sit a couple minutes, it was super carbonated.

Re: Open Cola

#37
I made Open Cola years and years ago, and here's the thing that surprised me most: You won't drink it and say "Hey, this tastes just like Coke!" It tasted good, it had some of the same sorts of flavor things going on that Coke does (sweet/tangy, neroli finish), but you would never mistake it for another cola.

The basic set of oils costs around $75 (most of that the neroli, IIRC), the carbonation setup I was able to do for around $100 (most of that the pressure regulator).

Re: Open Cola

#38
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given you drink diet sodas, you must care about your health, but drinking diet sodas is more unhealthy than coffee. For one, you're clearly concerned about sugar intake (and you should be), but you see one problem with our sugar intake is that it makes our taste buds tolerant to sugar, so in time it dulls our senses for fruits or milk or other healthy foods with naturally occurring sugar. And the problem is that arti…

Ecigarettes are actually better for you than real ones, and not only that, they basically make it easier to quit using nicotine altogether (according to reports I've seen).

They are better in terms of addiction- but in terms of cancer risk it's a wash.

Due to how poorly regulated the liquids are it has the potential to be worse as well.

Re: Open Cola

#39

I think there should be some kind of open source licence for branding stuff like this. So that anyone would be allowed to sell a drink under Open Cola brand as long as it is produced as defined in the specifications, and especially face legal penalties if someone tries to sell something else as Open Cola. Then we would need an app that tells where is the closest place to get open burger with cheese and fries to compe…

Basically Open Source Franchises?

An interesting idea...

Re: Open Cola

#40

This is such a cool idea. Since distribution is the real secret behind the success of Coca Cola and the beverage giants, I bet this would pair well with a Dollar Shave Club type of business model. Deliver a crate of Open Cola to people every month. Undercut the outrageous markups the big guys apply to fizzy sugar water in order to maintain their distribution monopoly. Pass the savings along to the customer. Heavy col…

Here's the only problem: It's still not Coke. I may love Open Cola, I don't know, but if you're setting yourself up to compete directly with Coke, you're setting yourself up for failure. I'm pretty sure it's actually more popular than Pepsi, too.
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