Quite Curious

ow the fun begins! We can experiment with different soda recipes now that we can carbonate water on the fly. We love craft soda, such as Thomas Kemper, Jones Soda or Sprecher, but they’re usually expensive and hard to find. (If you haven’t had Sprecher’s Cream Soda before, you must try it!)

So I did some research online and complied a list of ways to make your own healthy, delicious, old-fashioned soda. Here we go…

Or, read Making Homemade Soda: Part 1

Old-Fashioned Soda

Northern Brewer has a great selection of flavors, such as Cola, Ginger Ale, Root Beer, Ginger Beer, Cream Soda, Sarsaparilla and Cherry. $6.00 to make 4 gallons of soda isn’t bad at all, especially since we don’t drink soda that often, and if we do, we use less than recommended since we don’t like soda that sweet to begin with.

And if you’re into DIY stuff, here are some simple recipes I found to make homemade syrups:

Cream Soda

1 cup of honey or cane sugar
1 cup of water
1 tablespoon of vanilla

Boil all the ingredients in a pot into a syrup. Add to tonic water/seltzer to taste. Top with ice cream or half and half for extra yumminess. Keep the rest of the syrup on hand for later (I don’t think it needs to be refrigerated).

(Image from beveragewarehouse.com)

Italian Soda

There’s three major brands of flavored syrups you can buy: Torani, Monin, and DaVinci, Torani being the easiest to find. All of these have ever flavor under the sun.

Here are some flavors to get excited about: Amaretto, Blood Orange, Butterscotch, Chocolate, Coconut, Mint, Pomegranate, Almond (my favorite), Honey Vanilla, Pineapple, Toasted Marshmellow, French Vanilla, Acai, Chipotle Pineapple, Elderflower, Lavender, Lemongrass, Lychee, Sangria, Spicy Chestnut, White Peach…ok I need to stop. I wouldn’t mind adding some gin in any of these for a cocktail, either! Some flavors to not get excited about: Cheesecake, Peanut Butter, Pumpkin Pie, Shortbread, Roasted Chestnut, Rose. Ew.

Torani uses sugar in their syrups and has a line of sugar free syrups which contain Splenda. Monin uses pure cane sugar (hooray!), and has a line for Organic and Sugar Free. I think DaVinci uses a mix of different sweetners in their syrups, but their All Natural line has “…a bit more pure cane sugar than our Classic Syrups”. They also have a Sugar Free line.

As for me, I’m ordering the Lemongrass Syrup from Monin, since I’ve had Dry’s Lemongrass Soda which was AMAZING, and I really like that the sweetener is cane sugar. There truly is a taste difference, and cane sugar wins. I might try making my own lemongrass syrup, but for now I’m going to start easy.

Just for cost comparison, Dry’s Lemongrass Soda is around $2.00 per bottle depending where you get it, and to make it ourselves it’s $0.20 per glass of DIY carbonated water + $0.13 of syrup (estimating two pumps of syrup per glass, each being 0.25oz per pump), which totals to a whopping $0.33 for lemongrass soda. WIN.

(Photo and header photo from www.thetangibleintangible.com)

Swedish & Japanese Syrups

Here are some other syrups that we’ve come across lately at local stores. From left to right: Swedish Lingonberry Drink Concentrate, Onos Black Currant Concentrate, Calpico, and Elderflower Syrup. All are Swedish syrups from Ikea, except for the Calpico, which can be found in Asian grocery stores. The swedish drinks have about a 5:1 ratio of water to syrup, and the calpico is a 3:1 (I’m guessing for both). The lingonberry jug on the left has lasted us forever. I think we bought it last summer, it was about $15 or so? I can’t remember.

You’re probably wondering how we know so much about syrups and all. It’s not that we’re obsessed with sugary drinks (just the opposite, actually), it’s more that we’re concerned about the environment and well, we’re cheap.

The Swedish and that Japanese definitely have it right. Why? Because buying syrups in small bottles and adding water to make juice is space saving, cheaper, and more efficient to produce over juice. When you buy for example, commercial grape juice, the farm presses grapes into grape juice, then the water is evaporated from the juice to make concentrate. It then gets shipped to a center where water is added back in the juice, the juice gets pasteurized, and extra flavors/preservatives are added. Finally, the juice is shipped to distribution centers and stores.

What’s wrong with this picture? You’re essentially buying water that has additives, and has been shipped all over the place. With syrups, you cut out the extra steps in the process, AND save fuel. I’m guessing it’s not popular here because in America, we have enormous refrigerators that can hold huge bottles of juice, and we’re all about value - a large bottle of juice will sell better than a small bottle for the same price. It’s a fact.

So the next time you’re at an international grocery store, pick up a bottle of syrup and save yourself some money and shelf space!