Hard soda

So, I am a new homebrewer and am going to be going the keg route soon. When I do, I also plan on having a keg of carbed water on hand with a selection of syrups made up. I have also just started getting into ciders and through that have looked into other homemade malt beverages like hard lemonade and hard tea. That got me thinking about the malt beverage "Hard Colas" that I've seen in the stores before. Has anyone tried just making a neutrally-flavored "malt beverage base" around 5-6% ABV (water, sugar, ale yeast perhaps) and tried it with common soda syrups?

Does the idea have merit? Is it guaranteed to suck?

The idea has merit.. any idea has a bit of merit for that matter.

I'd probably skip the malt liquor idea and make my own real drink though. You can get the syrups at target or best buy that they use for the little home made soda machine.

Pour that into the keg along with the correct amount of water for the entire bottle, and pour in some bourbon. Carb and enjoy. People were doing that with the energy drink one and vodka in another thread.

Otherwise you'd have to use the extract stuff, not the pre-mixed syrup. The kind you'd get at a LHBS to make root beer and what not. You could probably use those in a a neutral malt liquor and backsweeten.

Even if I weren't allergic to malt & malt bev's I'd just go for adding vodka or rum to my soda. The reason being is that I'd want to make sure that the resulting malt bev, which is further sweetened, doesn't start fermenting again. This requires additional preservatives, or pasturizing, neither of which I'd prefer doing if I don't have to.
It could stay just fine and not ferment in the cold temperature though. Again though, I'm allergic so I'm not going to try it out, but sounds like it'd be worth at least trying if it wasn't for that.

I have made a Zima like beverage for my non-beer drinking wife and it came out excellent.. I used corn sugar, water, and chapagne yeast and it fermented to about 8% in week..

I tried again last week and today it measured only 1.3% (calculated using specific gravity)? This recipe was recommended by my local homebrew supply:


5 gallons water
15 lbs corn sugar
red star champagne yeast

after 1 week only 1.3%, what went wrong, what can I do to fix it? Thanks in advance for not ridiculing me for making hard grape soda.