Making Concentrates

[aqua-ed]

Hey Folks!
Does anyone have any experience with making their own soda concentrates? I'd like to make and bottle some concentrate that I can pasteurize to make shelf stable, then add to carbonated water when I want some homemade soda. Just curious if anyone has any thoughts or experiences.

As a side note, I am a teacher looking for something to do during the summer months. I've come up with some really tasty soda recipes and I'd like to come up with a summer gig of selling it at farmers markets (which are popular in my area). With the popularity of homebrew in the northwest, the soda angle seems "untapped". However, when selling sugary soda, I have to be a lot more worried about contamination and such, so I'm thinking maybe shelf-stable concentrates might be a good route. I'm open to thoughts on this, too.
Thanks!

 

[JayDubWill]

I just started dabbling in soda making from essential oils. Basically making your own concentrate like you posted. I've only made the open-cola recipe and learned a lot from it. It's amazing how powerful these oils are. One thing you will need to perfect is making an emulsion with the oils and gum arabic. That stuff clumps up super quick if you just dump it all in. You also need to be careful to get the best steam distilled oils you can. Most of mine are from Now foods. They have some oils that are solvent extracted and can make you seriously sick but they say on their web site what extraction method is used. LorAnn oils is anther reputable manufacturer. Glad to see there are other people interested in home made soda.

 

[aqua-ed]

Interesting. I never thought about using essential oils. My mental plan was something more along the line of steeping the herbs I use, then boiling it down to a concentrate instead of diluting and kegging. But, I imagine that would affect taste. I'm going to look into the essential oil idea. How cost effective is it? My goal is to come up with a root beer and ginger ale mix (my two favorite sodas to make)

 

[JayDubWill]

The oils are in the $6-20 each price range, it cost me about $80 to get all the oils for the open soda project. I calculate being able to get about 9 kegs worth (45 gallons) of soda. Works out to be about $8.80 per keg not counting sugar or the cost of CO2. compared to using 1 and 3/4 bottles of soda stream extract at $5-7 each, it's slightly more economical but a whole lot more fun. Keep in mind the open cola project uses 8 different oils. Something like lemon-lime would obviously only use those two. Orange cream would use only orange oil and vanilla extract. I've read that you can make a pretty close A&W clone using just wintergreen oil and vanilla extract (plus caramel color). I haven't tried it yet, but root beer is on my list. I looked into making root beer from scratch using real roots, and the cost put it close to $50 for a single 5 gallon keg. I guess if you have a sassafrass source (like your back yard) it could be cheaper. I also just found Zatarain's root beer extract in my grocery store for $1.99 and it makes 5 gallons. I don't know if Zatarain's is available in your area, but that price point is hard to compete with.

 

[aqua-ed]

For my homemade root beer, I use zatarains as a backbone, but make an "herb tea" that I steep with sugar and add to the keg with the extract. It makes a great, full flavored root beer, without all the cost. I might start by finding oils for those herbs seeing what I can do

 

[JayDubWill]

What herbs are you using, if you don't mind sharing?

 

[aqua-ed]

I use licorice root, star anise, cinnamon sticks, wintergreen, and vanilla beans

 

[JayDubWill]

Thanks, i'll have to give that a try.

 

[MrFoodScientist]

Have you tried the Anton Nocito book? The author is the owner of P&H soda, they sell concentrates in the New York City area, I believe.

 

[JayDubWill]

Have you tried the Anton Nocito book? The author is the owner of P&H soda, they sell concentrates in the New York City area, I believe.

Yeah, he's got a bunch of great recipes on his web site. I'll get his book eventually...after the 15 beer books still on my list. I actually made a chocolate soda based off his 2.0 recipe. the only difference was I steeped a pound of chocolate malt and added that to the keg. It added wonderful malty flavors but made so much head it was hard to pour. The kids ended up thinking chocolate soda was too weird so I got to enjoy most of the keg myself. I was ok with that.