Homemade Soft Drinks Save Money and Natural Resources

Homemade Soft Drinks Save Money and Natural Resources

My friends are usually amazed when I offer them a bottle of homemade ginger ale, root beer, or cola. Most of them didn't even know that it's possible to make soft drinks at home. As a matter of fact, it's not only possible; it's fun and easy.

I make mine from bottled flavor extracts, available at stores that supply amateur brewers and winemakers. You can buy soft drink extracts and other supplies you'll need from Semplex of America, 4159 Thomas Av. N., or American Wine Merchants Co., 919 W. Lake St., both in Minneapolis. Prices for extracts are lower at Semplex, which offers a mail order catalog free upon request.

Just follow directions that come with the extract. Here is the basic process: In a large, clean plastic pail, combine the bottle of extract, eight cups of sugar and four gallons of lukewarm water. Then dissolve a package of champagne yeast in warm water, quickly stir the mixture into the extract-sugar water. Siphon the liquid into clean, sterilized 12-ounce long-neck beer bottles (the returnable kind.) Seal the bottles with bottle caps, using a capper (also available at stores that sell beer-making supplies.) Keep the bottles in a cool, dark place for a week and then they're ready to drink (sometimes it takes a little longer).

(The yeast produces the carbonation. A small amount of alcohol also is produced in the process - reportedly about one-half of 1 percent, roughly equivalent to the amount of alcohol in orange juice or preservative-free fresh apple cider.) The amounts of alcohol and carbonation increase the longer the bottles are stored, so it's a good idea to consume the contents within two or three weeks.

Do not use non-returnable bottles; they may not be strong enough to withstand the internal pressure. Explosions seem to be a rare occurrence, but if you want to be completely safe, you can use two-liter plastic soft drink bottles with twist-tops. With twist-top bottles, you can quickly release the excess pressure that has built up by twisting the caps loose and then tightening them again.

A word of caution about opening the bottles: Refrigerate them before opening, and do not shake them. Handle the bottles as gently as possible, and open them very slowly. Otherwise, you may get a geyser that shoots up to the ceiling.

If you want to avoid the yeast and alcohol and control the carbonation more precisely, it is possible to carbonate the soft drinks by adding bottled club soda (which sort of defeats the purpose, if you are doing this to save money). Or, if you really want to get high-tech, you can invest in a home carbonation system that includes metal kegs plus assorted regulators, hoses and clamps, available for $125 plus tax and shipping from Great Fermentations of Santa Rosa, P.O. Box 428, Fulton, Calif. 95439, 1-800-544-1867. You have to hook it up to a refillable cylinder of carbon dioxide, available from welding supply companies. If you drink enough soda pop, this system will eventually pay for itself.

Making soft drinks at home is a good way to save money. Store-bought soft drinks can cost 55 or 60 cents a can or bottle, which seems like an awful lot of money to spend for carbonated sugar water. Homemade pop costs less than 10 cents a bottle.

Homemade soft drinks also are available in flavors that are difficult to find in stores, such as sarsaparilla, birch beer, and ginger beer - a zippier, spicier cousin of ginger ale. Most of the extracts contain some artificial ingredients, (as do many store-bought soft drinks) but there is one variety, Rainbow brand Ginger Ale, that contains only ginger extract and other natural resource ingredients.

You may like the savings, enjoy the process, the results and the feeling of accomplishment from drinking and serving something you made. But another reason to make your own is that store-bought pop sold in single-use glass or metal containers is a waste of energy and natural resources.

Minnesotans bought approximately 1.1 billion cans and bottles of soft drinks, according to John Gilkeson, senior pollution control specialist with the Minnesota State Office of Waste Management. Only about 100 million of those containers were refillable glass bottles; the rest were in non-returnable containers.

A little over 40 percent of the aluminum containers were recycled last year, but only about 20 to 25 percent of the glass containers were, and only a small percentage of plastic bottles. And recycling is far from a perfect solution: Even if the container isn't going to end up in a landfill, it's still a waste of energy to make a can that's only going to be used once. It takes a lot of energy to crush that can or bottle, melt it down, and turn it into something else.

Store-bought soft drinks in returnable, refillable bottles are much more efficient from an energy standpoint, but these days, they can be pretty hard to find. In some parts of the state, the nationally advertised brands of soft drinks are no longer available in returnable bottles at all. If you make your own soft drinks, you can reuse the containers again and again.

You're probably wondering how the homemade stuff tastes. I may be biased, but I like it a lot. Friends' reactions have varied, and some of the flavors seem to be more popular than others. All of the soft drinks I've made so far have had a more complex flavor and aroma than their store-bought counterparts. That's probably because of the champagne yeast.

Nearly everybody likes the ginger ale, while the root beer is more of an acquired taste. Some tasters seemed to find the cola a little dull compared to Coca-Cola, but one friend actually liked it better than "The Real Thing." She said Iggers' Cola tastes like Coke used to taste before the Coca Cola company switched from sugar to high-fructose corn syrup as the sweetener.