Help! I'm new, alone and scared in a sea of soda!

[Vandorf]

Howdy!

As you can most likely tell I am new here and a bit out of my depth at the moment! All I have is a love for all things soda and a dream of one day running my own soda bar! Of course I don't plan on selling anything I home-brew but I want to learn to make soda!

So I thought I would come here and join this little community and hopefully learn a few things on the way!

So to start I just was wondering if anyone could point me in the right direction for getting home-brew all started?

Many thanks!

 

[Homercidal]

There is a bit of soda know-how here, but it's mostly a homebrew site. What i would do is peruse the internet looking for information.

I have done a few batches of soda, but since I've cut soda out of my diet, for the most part, I don't do much of it anymore. My first batch was an extract and sugar kit and I bottled in some Coke bottles. I'd been homebrewing for years and wondered how the yeast were going to know when to stop fermenting and not make the bottles explode. Know what I found out? THEY DON'T!

After that time I started force carbonating my soda using my kegerator equipment and avoiding the bottle bombs altogether.

My batches were some of the "Old Fashioned" brand small bottles and some other brand I don't recall, and I also made a nice Ginger Ale using fresh ginger and vanilla extract. I have a 5 gallon corney keg and a 2.5 gallon SS fire extinguisher that I use for serving special events, like graduations, etc.

I think kegging makes soda making so much easier and I highly recommend it if you want to do this seriously. Especially if you are going to give your soda out to people. You can't trust them to keep soda in the fridge and drink it all up before the yeast make the bottles explode!

 

[daft]

Soda is the supreme elixir of life, and it does not need to be "brewed". Why not start out simply, and only introduce complexity as some need becomes apparent.

One simple approach is just to crack open a sealed plastic jug of juice (room temp cranberry works well) and chuck a bit of bread yeast into it and recap, squeezing out most of the air. Drawback is, you need to be there whenever IT decides it is ready and is bulging with bubbles several hours later. Oh, you can fridge it after it gets going to slow it down a bit.

Next step in complexity is a sodastream machine... comes with co2 bottles and their own flavors, which I hate. Anyway try another brand root beer extract plus syrup, or just simply frozen juice concentrate, like lemonade... yum.

If you like the result or potential, I hope you bought one of their models with a thick base which can contain a paintball container. Get one of the many adaptors online to a 20oz or so paintball flask and cut your co2 costs to near nothing. You may also wish to buy several of their empty half liter bottles so you can stock your fridge with a variety of prepared sodas.

I have written various threads that try to refine the above approaches. Failing that you can scroll the pages here for various heavy metal approaches...

 

[MrFoodScientist]

You may be new and scared, but you're never alone.