Sunnyleesmith
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Me and my wife started making soda syrup a few months ago and now we bought a soda fountain. We need some advice on "packaging" so we can serve it out of a box in bag set up..
I make my soda syrup -now how to keep and serve it?
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MrFoodScientist
Well-Known Member
Are you looking to have it in a bag? I know that corny kegs can be used for syrup.
If you haven't already, there's a nice powerpoint put together by Lancer that is available for download that explains a lot of common questions about post-mix setups. (I'm assuming that's what you mean when you say you "bought a soda fountain")
Basically, instead of running the syrups from the BIB through pumps, you hook up your CO2 to the IN on the corny keg and use that to push the syrups. I'm not sure the feasibility of swapping between BIB and corny syrups, since you likely are already running commercial syrups. If they're not easily swappable, you could either run some of the nozzles with pumps and dedicate those to commercial syrups and the other nozzles would run from kegs, or you could switch over all to kegs and just dump a commercial BIB into the keg when you want to run a commercial syrup. I do the all-corny keg route if it were me, but if you already have the pumps and don't want to waste them, I can understand that.
If you really must run bags, I'm not sure the availability of new bags. However, I do recall some shenanigans that a friend of mine pulled in high school. He was assistant manager at a second-run movie theatre and there were one or two times that we refilled an empty BIB with water, hoisted it up the maintenance ladder to the roof and dropped it off the top. Nothing like a 5 gal water balloon to rock the neighborhood.
But I digress, the point of that story is that there is a way to refill bags if you're game. I wouldn't recommend it from a sanitation standpoint, or even from a difficulty standpoint, but it's possible.
My one concern with all of this that I think is a big question mark to a lot of people, myself included, is shelf life. How fast do you run through a 5-gallon bag of syrup? Most, if not all commercial syrups are stabilized from spoilage with preservatives such as sodium benzoate. You can get your hands on some online, but then you want to make sure that you use it correctly, and it's not something that a lot of people are willing to deal with. You could theoretically hot fill your syrup if using kegs, but I'm not sure if the integrity of that is lost once you start pumping in CO2. Without preservatives or heat treatment, shelf life is not going to be indefinite and will depend on your process and ingredients. Granted there's not a lot that will start growing in a concentrated sugar solution, but there are some osmotolerant yeasts and molds that could start growing over time. A couple solutions to this might be either using smaller kegs, AIH has pretty good prices on 3 gal pin-lock kegs, though that's still roughly 18 gallons of finished beverage depending on your brix ratio. Another option would be to keep your syrups refrigerated, though that will make them more viscous, and I don't know if that causes problems with mixing, not to mention the challenge of finding refrigerated space to put kegs (or bags if that's the route you want to take) with close enough access to your fountain.
Anyway, that's my two (really wordy) bits.
↓Recipes are the easy part ↓
If you haven't already, there's a nice powerpoint put together by Lancer that is available for download that explains a lot of common questions about post-mix setups. (I'm assuming that's what you mean when you say you "bought a soda fountain")
Basically, instead of running the syrups from the BIB through pumps, you hook up your CO2 to the IN on the corny keg and use that to push the syrups. I'm not sure the feasibility of swapping between BIB and corny syrups, since you likely are already running commercial syrups. If they're not easily swappable, you could either run some of the nozzles with pumps and dedicate those to commercial syrups and the other nozzles would run from kegs, or you could switch over all to kegs and just dump a commercial BIB into the keg when you want to run a commercial syrup. I do the all-corny keg route if it were me, but if you already have the pumps and don't want to waste them, I can understand that.
If you really must run bags, I'm not sure the availability of new bags. However, I do recall some shenanigans that a friend of mine pulled in high school. He was assistant manager at a second-run movie theatre and there were one or two times that we refilled an empty BIB with water, hoisted it up the maintenance ladder to the roof and dropped it off the top. Nothing like a 5 gal water balloon to rock the neighborhood.
But I digress, the point of that story is that there is a way to refill bags if you're game. I wouldn't recommend it from a sanitation standpoint, or even from a difficulty standpoint, but it's possible.
My one concern with all of this that I think is a big question mark to a lot of people, myself included, is shelf life. How fast do you run through a 5-gallon bag of syrup? Most, if not all commercial syrups are stabilized from spoilage with preservatives such as sodium benzoate. You can get your hands on some online, but then you want to make sure that you use it correctly, and it's not something that a lot of people are willing to deal with. You could theoretically hot fill your syrup if using kegs, but I'm not sure if the integrity of that is lost once you start pumping in CO2. Without preservatives or heat treatment, shelf life is not going to be indefinite and will depend on your process and ingredients. Granted there's not a lot that will start growing in a concentrated sugar solution, but there are some osmotolerant yeasts and molds that could start growing over time. A couple solutions to this might be either using smaller kegs, AIH has pretty good prices on 3 gal pin-lock kegs, though that's still roughly 18 gallons of finished beverage depending on your brix ratio. Another option would be to keep your syrups refrigerated, though that will make them more viscous, and I don't know if that causes problems with mixing, not to mention the challenge of finding refrigerated space to put kegs (or bags if that's the route you want to take) with close enough access to your fountain.
Anyway, that's my two (really wordy) bits.
↓Recipes are the easy part ↓
chefhatesme
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Have you found anything that worked for packaging?
