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.
I mean, my grocer doesn't sell individual beans either. So why should wholesalers be forced?
But what about prepackaged beans, like 500 gram pack? You can't open the package and expect to pay for part of it. Sometimes the beans are packaged by the grocery store with their branding. That's the same as not letting you buy an individual bean.
But the town is dying/dead. There's really only 1 major business in town and the school. It's surrounded by farm land.
In my father's day, it had everything from a hardware store, full service garage, a bowling ally, movie theater, restaurant, and dance hall. All that is gone now.
In my youth the restaurant and grocery store were still around. You had to call ahead to the restaurant as they would only open in a call ahead fashion.
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.
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.
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...
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...
A neat trick, even if nobody cared.
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-...
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
Edit: My bad, I didn't realise that was for 5 bottles. Carry on.
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.
Look for “mate cocido”. La Tranquera is the brand I use.
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.
"All things being equal" = that time constant is itself a function of temperature, so lower temperatures slow down (spread out) the process, allowing a broader "balance point" at which to stop the process.
IOW, if you're brewing a hot cup of tea, leaving the bag in an extra few minutes can really increase the bitterness without making it much "darker", but even a few extra hours in the fridge-brewed tea is no big deal.
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.
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
Looking at the Canadian website, neither is sold in Canada (1 for a link on the German website). There is the SodaStream Duo which supports a different type of glas bottle. Might be easier to source locally, but exists only with the quick-connect cylinders and is a bit expensive for what it is, at least if you buy it new
[1]: https://sodastream.de/products/crystal-3-0?variant=404654832...
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.
I wouldn't recommend going that high for a carbonated drink though, unless you like to live dangerously while opening your soda.
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.
This content creator used a mass spectrometer to find the flavoring used in Coca-Cola.
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.
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".
Add modifinil and peptides and you'll have your latest soylent startup.