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Make Your Own Soda Pop
If you’ve worked concessions at a movie theater, you know how to make soda fizzy: Run a tube from a CO2 canister to your container of cola syrup and turn it on, and the gas creates bubbles in the cola. Most commercial soda companies use this “forced carbonation,” as do bars and fast-food restaurants.
The other two ways of carbonating, both forms of natural fermentation, use yeasts. In the first method, packaged yeast is added to your other soda ingredients. Then you bottle the soda and allow the yeast to consume the sugar. The yeast releases gasses in the form of bubbles. There is a risk of your bottles exploding if you add too much yeast. We have measured out exactly how much you need for our root beer recipe.
You can also ferment using only naturally occurring yeasts found in the air, as we did in our ginger beer recipe. As strange as it may sound, you simply expose your base sugar water to the air, and allow yeasts to battle for dominance. Eventually one strain wins, and that’s your yeast. You add the resulting bug, a frothy liquid that’s sort of like a sourdough starter, to the rest of your ingredients and bottle the mixture. Of the three methods, this produces the lightest carbonation, so there’s little risk of your bottles exploding.
Are there any poisonous or dangerous yeasts that could get into your drink? No, says Tucker Madey, of San Francisco Brewcraft, a home brewing supply store in San Francisco.
“There’s no natural yeast that will hurt you, as far as I know,” says Madey. “I’ve never heard of anything.” Bacterial contamination is a possibility, but not any more so than when you’re making any kind of food.
To stop fermentation, all you need to do is refrigerate your bottles. Yeast goes dormant in cold temperatures.
-Lessley Anderson
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Awesome. =)
San Francisco brewcraft is a fantastic place to go to pick up supplies for the first time brewer. The staff there will gladly get you started and guide you throw all steps of the brewing process.
Wicked. My 6 yr old loves root beer, so this will be perfect for a brew day w/him!
Please, for the sake of safety and your eyes, do not follow these instructions. You may succeed once or twice, but you WILL eventually get a bottle explosion. Search the Google Groups newsgroup archives and you will see hundreds of threads on this topic. Bottle explosions are not fun. At the minimum you'll have a big mess of slushy glass shards to clean up, and if your luck is not so good you'll have a trip to the emergency room for glass removal from your eyes or some other part of your body.
Refrigeration does -NOT- stop fermentation!! It merely slows it down. And putting in less yeast is certainly not going to make more or less carbonation--yeast, like other organisms, can do this neat little trick called reproduction. This type of carbonation is unpredictable and dangerous; depending on the exact temperature, wort composition, and mood of the yeast (age, vigor, etc) it may take 20 days for an explosion, or it may take 12 hours.
You have no way of knowing what's going to happen if you try this method, so instead go out and buy some good quality locally made craft soda. Or get a CO2 tank and a carbonation cap and carbonate your own that way. This will lead to much better control over your carbonation levels, a much safer process, and you'll be sipping your soda in minutes instead of days.
davis... is correct; over carbonated bottles can explode. I can't think of any reason for not using plastic bottles; they, too, will explode if pressure gets high enough, but I think they can probably take more pressure and I'm pretty sure that risk of injury will be less. Alternatively, if you want to go to all the trouble, is to pasteurize your sealed bottles -- the heat will actually kill the yeast. I've never done this because I don't make soda, but I would suppose that even soaking the bottles for awhile in very hot water -- even just 160F -- so long as the contents of the bottle get that hot and stay at that temp for maybe an hour -- would most likely kill all of the yeast so that you'd never need to worry about bottle bombs.
Cheers.
Bill Velek
Of course, my instructions were meant for bottles that had already been property carbonated before you pasteurize.
Bill