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DIY Soft Drinks

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Re: DIY Soft Drinks

#71

Post by dlcarrier »

the__alchemist wrote: post #65

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…

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.

Re: DIY Soft Drinks

#72

Post by plomme »

peaxkl wrote: post #24

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] - 500m…

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

Re: DIY Soft Drinks

#73

Post by dlcarrier »

analog31 wrote: post #51

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.

Re: DIY Soft Drinks

#74

Post by cogman10 »

detritus wrote: post #30
mattmaroon wrote: post #22

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…

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.

Re: DIY Soft Drinks

#75

Post by foresto »

dlcarrier wrote: post #66
foresto wrote: post #41

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…

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 haza…

> 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. Even if there was one, I would expect it to be noticed quickly or else too slow for the released CO2 to cause harm.

Re: DIY Soft Drinks

#76

Post by userbinator »

Scoundreller wrote: post #69
jackdawed wrote: post #36

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,…

> acetic acid (Vitamin C) ascorbic acid!

Acetic acid is vinegar. Not something I'd like to taste in any soft drink.

Re: DIY Soft Drinks

#77

Post by dlcarrier »

DonHopkins wrote: post #27

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…

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?

Re: DIY Soft Drinks

#78

Post by dlcarrier »

rootusrootus wrote: post #53
SamDc73 wrote: post #26

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.

Re: DIY Soft Drinks

#79

Post by dlcarrier »

foresto wrote: post #75
dlcarrier wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 haza…

> 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 ser…

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.

Re: DIY Soft Drinks

#80

Post by fakedang »

cogman10 wrote: post #74
detritus wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 toda…

And I'm guessing, without a local grocery store at the very least, your hometown is also a dying entity?
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