Fun fact: Angostura bitters has gentian root extract in it, which is also in the northeastern US's favorite regional soda specialty: Moxie! If you like that, you'll probably also like Moxie.

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.

Try walnut or cherry bitters sometimes for a similar but different enough to be interesting flavor.

wait, are those the only ingredients?

The Stepan company in New Jersey is the only entity legally allowed to import coca leaves (aside from the DEA, ICE, the FBI and a few others that buy and sell all the time) and extract the illegal methyl benzoyl ecgonine (C17H21NO4) leaving the flavor compounds. Query whether they would sell the de-cocainized product to a soft drink hobbyist. Friends in Colombia report that Sek Cola sold there has the ecgonine ingredient. Not sure how close the recipe replicates the original Atlanta beverage.

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?

The bit about dogs just gives me nightmares. I picture a few puffs of the dust from that dispersing in my kitchen during that experiment, and then every item then in the vicinity becoming a beacon for drug dogs for the rest of my life :D

Same but for Diet Coke. Would make ridiculous amounts of it

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.

The dose (often) makes the poison.

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.

Yes! Also his book "Fix the Pumps" https://a.co/d/0intXOn1 which has a bizarre title and cover art, but is right up there with "Liquid Intelligence" for traditional sodas.