How To Brew Your Own Soda

There are many reasons you might be concerned about soda consumption and looking to cut back. With ingredients like high fructose corn syrup, aspartame, phosphoric acid, and artificial colorings, mass produced soda obviously isn’t the healthiest option for you and your family. Plus, purchasing cans and bottles can be costly. But wanting to change your soda habits doesn’t mean you have to eliminate it altogether.

Here’s how to make your own soda, from the convenience of your own home, so you don’t have to go without it.

What Are the Benefits of Making Your Own Soda?

When you make your own home-brewed soda, you control everything. You oversee each step of the process, manage the ingredient amounts, and make alterations based on your preferences. So if, for example, you find mainstream sodas too sweet or want to reduce your sugar intake, you can control the level of your soda’s sweetness by adding less sugar or sweetener.

You can also customize your home-brewed soda to your tastes and preferences. Whether you’re looking for something sweet, strong, or zesty, you can add different ingredients to satisfy your craving. And you don’t have to drink any of those additives or chemicals you may not want.

Brewing your own soda is significantly less wasteful than purchasing soda. Not only are you preventing a multitude of cans or bottles from ending up in landfills, but you’re saving some serious cash by making your own soda at home. This makes home-brewed soda much more financially and environmentally friendly than store-bought soda.

How to Flavor a Soda Fast

For a quick and easy way to enjoy a soda, you can start with plain club soda and flavor it to your liking. Club soda is so versatile that it makes a great base for an array of flavor pairing options. Plus, club soda on its own has no sugar and no calories, making it much healthier than most sodas on the market.

Get creative by trying the following methods:

• Natural ginger ale: Simmer honey and ginger together into a syrup and add it to your club soda.
• Fruit soda: Simmer a concentrated fruit juice or muddled fruit, plus water and sugar or alternative sweetener, then add to your club soda.
• Flavor combinations: Experiment with various fruits and herbs, like strawberries or blackberries with mint or rosemary. Try different sweeteners besides sugar, like honey or stevia.
• Other quick and easy options: Even adding a squeeze of lime, handful of berries, or juice from an orange to your club soda can make for a quick, refreshing beverage when you’re short on time.

Becoming a Soda Brewmaster

Now, if you’re a serious home cook who is always looking to make things from scratch, consider learning to brew your own soda. Homebrewed soda gets its carbonation from fermentation rather than the process of pumping gas into the beverage, so expect this labor of love to take several days, not just a few hours.

Follow the steps below from Adventures in Homebrewing to concoct your home-brewed soda.

Assemble the following ingredients and items:

• Sugar
• Soda extract or other flavors
• Yeast (wine yeast or brewing yeast preferred over baker’s yeast)
• Large pot
• 1- or 2-liter plastic soda bottles

Soda Recipe:

1. Combine water and sugar in a pot on the stove and heat it until all of the sugar is dissolved.
2. Pour the sugar water into a large bucket and add soda extract (or other flavors) and yeast.
3. Divide the soda solution into different bottles and tightly seal the lids. Be sure they’re stored at 70 degrees F, so the yeast eats the sugar, and CO2 begins to be released. This is what forms the carbonation.
4. Check the bottles every 24 hours to see if the carbonation has formed by squeezing the bottles. When the bottles don’t have any give, put them in the refrigerator to keep them cold until you’re ready to drink them!

Whether you’re getting healthier, trying to save money, or just experimenting in your own kitchen, brewing your own soda is a worthy endeavor. It certainly takes some patience and some trial and error, but once you get the hang of it, you might find you prefer your homemade soda over store-bought.

Interested in learning more culinary techniques and tips? Try one of Escoffier Home Gourmet’s online cooking classes. These à la carte courses are a wonderful way to learn specific recipes and innovative techniques in a step-by-step process.

And if you’re ready to turn your culinary lifestyle into an exciting career, take the next step and apply for an online culinary degree or diploma from Auguste Escoffier School of Culinary Arts.

Want to learn more? Read these articles next!

• A Guide Into The Most Effective Wine Pairings
• How To Make Espagnole Sauce
• 5 Spices to Use Instead of Salt

This article was originally published on September 22, 2016, and has since been updated.

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