The Blow Leprechaun

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I went ahead and took a crack at making soda. I bought a 2 liter bottle of coke and when it was finished, sanitized it with a bleach solution and proceeded to brew up my soda mix.

I based what I was doing off the Pop Art BYO article,

• 2.25 liters water
• 1/2 cup table sugar
• 4 tablespoons lemon juice

Boiled for 15 minutes. I added one cinnamon stick for the duration of the boil and used your everyday average bread yeast to ferment. I poured everything into the 2L bottle, including the cinnamon stick, and topped up with bottled spring water.

I went with bread yeast because I don't want to have to go to my HBS every time I want to make soda, so if I didn't like how it tasted with bread yeast, I wasn't going to bother continuing with it.

The results:
It has a very sour smell, basically it smells like bread yeast. This had me very concerned before I tasted it, but I needn't be concerned. There's maybe a very slight bread yeast flavor to it, but not much. The cinnamon flavor is extremely mild. If I do this one again, I will definitely increase the amount of cinnamon I use, maybe even grind it to improve the extraction of flavors.

All in all, it worked nicely. The bottle was rock hard 13 hours after pitching the yeast, and I stuck it in the fridge.

Brew-Happy

Recipes 

I hadn't thought of cinnamon soda. Nice idea!

I wonder if a little orange peel in your boil would be nice.

This could lead to some new ideas for me!

Keep updating!

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The Blow Leprechaun

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I'm really happy with making my own soda... not only does it let me avoid high fructose corn syrup a little more, it lets me do all kinds of crazy stuff.

I'm planning to do an amaretto soda one of these days, but I'm doing lime next (got some homemade lime extract I made for a beer that I want to use up).

Revvy

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Oh great...Just what we need another Soda Magnate coming up with weird stuff...Isn't one enough?



Seriously though, Congrats!!!!

One idea that you might want to consider...My nephew makes snhapps and uses Jolly Rancher candies as his flavoring (his apple pucker and his cinammon is the bomb!) He melts them down in a double boiler then mixes them with his liquor base...You could try melting any flavored hard candies down that way, Butterscotch, Blueberry Suckers, basically anything made with hard flavored sugar...

Keep us posted.

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OregonNative

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Sounds like you made a nice soda man. I've never made soda, but it sounds fun. I'd love to see a picture sometime if you took any.

The Blow Leprechaun

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That's a really great idea... I'll probably give that a shot.
It looks pretty ugly, actually. The lemon juice for the acid made the whole thing look like an extremely pale lemonade. It doesn't taste like lemon, but it looks it. If I were going to make soda for a special event, I'd absolutely use champagne yeast and probably some food coloring. And if it were really special, I'd look into using an acid blend instead of lemon juice.

But I'm doing this cuz I want soda without HFCS mostly, so I'm not really trying to impress anyone

cucone

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Did you go any further with this? Definitely a "why didn't I think of it" idea.

The Blow Leprechaun

Recipes 

Sadly, I haven't done much soda making for a while! I have some cinnamon extract I got on clearance that I might turn to for another attempt at cinnamon soda, but this weekend I'm in beer mode!