Recipes for homemade sodas!

Hi, I work at a science center where we make homemade soda all of the time...Usually root beer, cream soda, vanilla cola, and raspberry cola. But we have a ton of different extracts (orange, lemon lime, ginger beer) and we would like to use those, too. We've tried making them with vanilla, lemon juice, etc. and they don't turn out well. Does anyone have good recipes or suggestions for any of those extracts?

We usually make 8c of soda with 1c of sugar and carbonate it with dry ice.

Thanks!!

Don't turn out well how? Is there not enough carbonation? Not enough sweetness? A chemical taste? A bitter taste?

A lot of times when the flavor isn't well rounded, we recognize that something is wrong, but can't pinpoint what. You need to think about what components are in a 'true' flavor that you're trying to match that may not be in your extract.

For example if you're doing a fruit flavor, you'll get a more true-to-type flavor if you add citric acid.

I'm really new at the homemade soda thing. I just got a Carbonator cap recently, used it to carb the beer that wouldn't fit in my kegs.

After I drank that I made a two liter batch of Tazo Passion tea, sweetened it with 1/4 cup of sugar and carbonated that to 30 PSI at 50F, before moving it to my actual refrigerator which is colder.

It's really quite nice. I was looking for a lower sugar soda and I might even experiment with less than 1/4 cup of sugar.