Super Awesome Lemongrass Soda

Have you guys ever heard of Dry Soda Company? They have 4 packs of glass bottled sodas that I've seen in Rhubarb, Kumquat, Lavender, and Lemongrass flavors. A 4-pack of 12 ounce bottles is more than 6 bucks, but I had to try them. Rhubarb had almost no flavor to me, but the others were really nice. They're mildly flavored and sweetened - a refreshing break from commercial sodas in general.

Tonight I was feeling like cooking something nice for the wife and kiddos and went out grocery shopping. While I paced the aisles, I thought "I could SO make those sodas for cheap!" and so I picked up some fresh lemongrass. I freestyled a recipe, which came out SUPERBLY, and thought I'd share.

This recipe is for ONE LITER of soda, carbed with a carbonater cap.

1 liter H2O (actually a bit less to allow for shaking room to carb)
3 tbsp evaporated cane juice (or just sugar if you're not as much of a food snob)
1/4 tsp citric acid
.5 oz FRESH lemongrass, finely chopped

Combine in saucepan, simmer or hot-steep about 5 minutes. I quick cooled by setting the saucepan on ice.

Carb and drink.

I love the stuff and will be making it again. If you brew this, let me know what you think!

.5 oz of lemongrass doesn't seem like much to me, but I guess for just a liter that's a lot. Which part of the grass did you use? The Asian superstore by my work has giant bundles of lemongrass. They're pretty woody near the roots. I generally just use the top half of the stalks and discard the bases.

The stuff I found was just the ends of the stalks, looks like right near the root end. No 'grass' involved in this package. It looked a lot like the white parts of scallions, if you know what I mean. .5 ounce was one of the thicker pieces from the package, or two of the thinner ones. the flavor was just right for what I was looking for.

I gave this recipe a shot using two lemongrass stalks. It was really nice and light. More like a slightly sweet and flavored seltzer. I'm about to fill up one of my 3 gallon corny kegs with this.

Thanks for posting the recipe!

My pleasure. I love the understated-ness of it as well. Glad to know someone has enjoyed it too.

I'm just starting to get interested in soda making- and these are exactly the kind of sodas I want to make. The thing is- I don't have any equipment to force carbonate. Would this recipe work with a yeast carbonation? I would assume I would have to add more sugar to get it going. Anybody have experience making Dry type sodas with yeast?

The main problem I forsee is the flavors created by the yeast. There's not much else here to cover up that slight funkiness, which might ruin an otherwise very clean soda. I guess I would recommend creating a concentrate and adding that to some commercial soda water.

Thats the way I've done ginger ale in the past. Make a syrup and then add soda water. A side benefit is that it makes it easy to control how strong you want the taste to be. I've used this recipe in the past. Great with bourbon!

I like Dry sodas. They're really the reason I started making soda -- I wanted to make something similar to theirs but kind of got hooked on ginger ale instead. Might be time to try it again.

maybe consider getting a ginger beer plant, you can make it as dry as you like, and a version with lemongrass is likely to be delicious
especially for those who want natural carbonation, quickly, with none of the problems associated with yeast

I've been using GBP for the past month or so, just for ginger beer. My kids love the stuff. It may be that it wouldn't thrive quite as well with other ingredients, but if you kept the acid level about the same, it should at least work to some degree.

i have also had my gbp about a month, have been kind of blindly testing different recipes and so far it is gangbusters with whatever i put in there (different sugars, lemon/lime, chilis, varying amounts of fresh ginger) so i will eventually try some lemongrass and report back. the only thing i have challenged the gbp with that has word-of-mouth antimicrobial properties is the chilis, and those didn't seem to hold it back at all