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My reason is because it tastes better and healthier.

I updated it a few days ago. I was thinking of making a seperate app because of a few techinical differences between how how sodas are made vs cocktails but after thinking about it for a bit I worked thought the issues and was able to get them in the same app. I wanted to make sure i didnt make it cluttered and overwhelming and i think i was able to organize it in a way i am happy with. I added 65 new drink recipes and 51 new ingredients, thats why i havent made a video in a few weeks. What do you think of the way it I added sodas back in?

He said just kidding

Sodas are still made with alcohol today. The method I used in this video is the same method almost every soda manufacturer uses. we use vanilla extract when we make cookies and that is alcoholic but it doesn't make cookies an alcoholic food. And prior to the FDA there were many drugs in sodas. 7up was a mood stabilizer, root beer had anti-inflammatory and cough meds, chocolate drinks were popular opiate drinks, etc. Sodas are indeed labeled as non-alcoholic because they have so little alcohol in them that you could never get inebriated from them. Most flavored sodas have added alcohol to emulsify the oils, which brings them to an alcohol by volume of 0.0005%. That's super small. Non-alcoholic beers tend to be around 0.05% - 0.1% ABV, and around 1% ABV, drinks start to get labeled as low ABV. Even store-bought juices are usually around 0.1% from natural fermentation. Soda companies don't publicly list ethanol as an ingredient because they can hide it in the "Natural Flavors" label to protect their recipe. One would have to drink around 150 sodas to equal the alcohol content of 1 beer.

It has so many different flavors I have a hard time picking out any specific flavor. If i didnt find the recipe i never would have guessed it was in there. here is a link to my website that shows a copy of the original recipe for pepsi when it was disclosed during the company's first bankruptcy. vintageamericancocktails.com/pepsi/

Not at these concentrations. you can try vegetable glycerin but it's not as effective at keeping the oils emulsified as ethanol. 95% ethanol can emulsify around 5% oil by volume but regular 40% vodka can only dissolve around 0.5%. The benefit of using 95% is it creates much stronger flavor concentrates (essences). a standard 360ml soda has only 2 drops of flavor essence. If you try using 40% vodka it would require around 20 drops/1 ml of flavoring. then again that's not a huge difference but there might be a little bit of an alcohol flavor to it. try it! make a 0.5% solution with vodka and add 10 drops of lemon and 10 drops of lime essence.

I think i figured out the Baja blast flavor and have the taste down to a T. Going to try and make a video of that soon. Yeah they came out with some awesome new flavors

maybe a week. Not long at all. Once you dilute the syrup it loses all of its antimicrobial properties. The added acid will also slowly denature the oils and change the flavor. most soda companies use Sodium benzoate as a preservative to protect the flavor and ward off anything growing in it.

That would be better. malt extract works too.

of course! glad you like it.

Sorry, it took so long to respond. I get asked about oils often enough that I have a block of text that I copy-paste in. hope this helps answer your oil question. "The problem with finding good oils is there is no one perfect supplier for oils to make drinks with. There are many good essential oil suppliers but there are some crumby ones. There are cheap oils and some very expensive ones. Fortunately, if an oil says it’s steam distilled or cold pressed and undiluted, then it probably is and I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Most oils are not too expensive so a bottle of cold-pressed lemon oil for 15-25 bucks is fine and most likely very high quality. Some though are very expensive. A 10 ml bottle of neroli or rose will never be less than 100 - 150 dollars. If you find a bottle of Neroli for less than that, it is for sure cut with other oils, It should say it is cut with other oils, but it might not. In addition, there is no regulatory body overseeing essential oils. There are groups, such as the Essential Oil University, that will perform GCMS testing on oils and certify an oil’s level of purity, but submitting to groups like this is voluntary. The 2 main things to look for when buying oils are: 1). Only use cold press or steam-distilled oils. 2). Only use 100% pure oils. Never use oils cut with other oils. If you want to cover yourself find manufacturers that provide their GCMS oil test results. companies like Eden’s Garden and others do this, but those oils tend to come at a premium. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Lime or lemon oil for 15- 20 bucks is reasonable, but rose oil for 15-20 bucks? Impossible. You can find these oils online and 10-30 ml of pure essential oil will last you a long, long time. 10ml of an oil can fully flavor almost 2000 drinks. That’s over 5 years if you make 1 soda a day. Just to put the cost into perspective. By making your own syrups and sodas think of all the preservatives you are avoiding, but if buying oil stuff is a bit worrisome you can also make a homemade extract with the actual spices and peels. The essence recipes are 5% solutions but a standard extract will be 0.5%. just 10x each flavor for an extract replacing an essence. So instead of 0.5ml, use 5ml. just soak some nutmeg or lemon peels in vodka, add a teaspoon of each infusion, and call it a day. I hope this helps. It’s not a question with a simple answer, and depending on the oils you want will require you to do a little research." -Now for the caffeine question. It depends on where you live but in the United States, pure liquid caffeine is prohibited from being sold to the public. It's very very very easy to kill yourself or someone else with caffeine. there are caffeine supplements you can find at nutrition stores that are dosed and premixed. some have flavor but some are flavorless. I just got flavorless 200mg caffeine capsules and dissolved them in water. I wouldn't be able to add caffeine any other way. but do be careful with caffeine, It's easy to accidentally have too much. most sodas have around 40-50mg of caffeine which is comparable to a cup of green tea.

@@VintageAmericanCocktails Thank you so much for your answer and knowlage it will really help!

Sorry for replying so late. This makes me so happy to hear! I'm glad you like it. I started doing this because I think it's fun and I imagined others might think it was fun too. They also taste so much better than anything you could buy at a store and I think a big part of that is just the freshness of the ingredients. most sodas are around 2-3 months old by the time you buy them from the store. that's why Coke from McDonald's tastes better because the syrup is shipped directly to them from the factory. yeah, it's hard to go back to just boiling a cinnamon stick in syrup after making these huh. Neroli is my absolute favorite too. Nutmeg is a very close second. If you have an iPhone or iPad I have an app with all these recipes in it. If not my website is set up similarly to the app. vintageamericancocktails.com apps.apple.com/us/app/vintage-american-cocktails/id1315509022 This comment made my day. Thank you. How did your Mountain Dew turn out?

I have made this streamers syrups before and have replaced sugar with sucralose and they come out great. I recommend using SOME sugar though, maybe just 1/4 cup, and the rest splenda or sucralose powder. For sucralose powder, start with small amounts, you can add more if needed, like 1/4 of a teaspoon of sucralose powder for what he's making in the video, and 1/4 cup sugar. You can actually make yourself sick if you put a whole teaspoon of sucralose powder in there, I made that mistake when I started out. If you're using granulated splenda in the big bag, it's 1:1 with sugar. Do try it with just a little sugar though, even just a tablespoon, it takes away the artificial taste.

@@doombga thank you!!

A friend of mine came over a few years ago and made orange juice from those little frozen concentrated orange juice tubes and I felt like I had time traveled. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw one of those and thought they were just an 80s 90s thing. I was legitimately blown away and my friend looked at me like I was crazy and told me how these were everywhere. Sure enough I went to the grocery store and I saw them in the frozen fruit section. I get frozen strawberries from time to time and I swear to god I have never seen them there till that day. Now I see them every time I go in frozen fruit. It’s like quantum orange concentrate. It only existed once I observed it willed it into existence and it still weirds me out. I bet you that you will find it now that you know they do still exist. I found this at Walmart in the frozen fruit section on the bottom shelves.

@@VintageAmericanCocktails OK - I had recently noticed their absence but I was looking in the orange juice area near the dairy section. Now I know where to look. I just assumed they were no longer available. Your vids make me want to make my own sodas w/o to modern chemicals. Thanks.

@@Spearhead-lz1oq thank you! I’m glad you feel that way. They taste noticeably better than store bought sodas but there are a few items to buy upfront. The oils can cost a bit upfront but they last for forever.

@@VintageAmericanCocktails Is there a good go -to source for the oils?

Yeah it’s just sprite with concentrated orange juice. The flavor is identical to Mountain Dew but it doesn’t taste like it’s made with corn syrup or has sat in a plastic bottle for months

Yeah the cherry juice I used was not concentrated if you’re using a concentrate like grape juice or orange concentrate I would dilute it to try and get a 1:1 of concentrate to sugar water ratio. So if it’s 12 oz of concentrate then add 5 oz of water and 1 cup of sugar. Also weighing everything helps, I provide volume measurements and they should be accurate but measuring by weight is the only real way to be exact. I’m so glad you are making this! Cherry Vanilla Coke is the most complicated soda recipe I have ever made but it is good. Nice thing is the cherry syrup can be used for anything. Good luck!

Remind

Yeah that was a fun one to learn about. I found in an agricultural periodical from 1918 an article about how this new method of concentrating and evaporating foods at room temperature was making new food possible. By putting an item in a vacuumed chamber and lowing the atmospheric pressure they could get water to boil at ambient temperatures. The article mentioned how new food coming out of this were grape syrup, condensed milk, instant powdered foods and drinks, and that Heinz started using it to improve the taste of their ketchup.

Good Question. I don't continue cooking the syrup because I want it to be a specific 3:2 ratio. I can see cooking it to caramelize the sugars, but there is so much else going on in this syrup that it doesn't matter. the 3 primary simple syrup ratios I can think of are 1:1, 3:2, and 2:1. the 3:2 is the syrup ratio that most pharmacists preferred by the late 1800s and using the scale to weigh it out gets me to that exact ratio. It's also the ratio still used by Coke. A 3:2 will get you 40g of sugar in a 12oz soda and the label on a 12oz mexican coke has 39g of sugar. so it's close enough. If I cooked it any longer I would get some nice flavors but I would lose the sugar concentration. 1:1 is fine. the sugar won't precipitate out but it spoils faster and you need to use more of it. the 2:1 is nice and strong, it won't freeze solid but sugar crystals will come out of the solution at room temperature, but it does last much longer and you don't need to use too much of it. Pharmacists eventually settled on a 3:2 ratio because it had the benefits of both without the downsides of either. The sugar won't crystalize out, even when refrigerated, it lasts almost as long as a 2:1, and it will not solidify at freezing temperatures. I know this is a long-winded explanation for why I did 600g sugar and 400g water, but that's why lol.

@@VintageAmericanCocktails This is what I wanted to know actually, I like the idea of just stirring it in simply because it's faster and easier, and I have a ton of gum powder for thickening anyways. I'm presently experimenting with a mountain dew base that is 1:3 sugar to sucralose for my sodas and am following the oil/everclear method you show in your video. Not trying to crack the recipe exactly, but mostly just trying to find my own thing using those flavors. If you haven't discovered it yet, there's a product called Kaffn8 that is pure liquid caffeine and it's mostly flavorless other than a tiny bit of bitterness. I got it in last week and it's waaaay stronger than it says it is. Maybe my body just needs to adjust to it, but I'm using 1/8th of the recommended amount in a 20 oz Mt. Dew and getting totally zooted out lol. It's good stuff.

Yeah it was the easiest soda syrup I’ve made. I found a cool industrial agriculture article from 1918 talking about how amazing vacuum chamber evaporation is. It talked about how they have never been able to make a good preserved grape juice but using hersheys technique they can make good long lasting concentrates. The article ended with saying how the process is being used to concentrate all sorts of stuff like orange juice, instant coffee, evaporated milk, and it how Heinz started using the technique to improve their ketchup recipe.

Glad you guys liked it

Hopefully it’s insane in a good way lol. Yeah just approach it like cheese making by adding those two cheap ingredients and you can make gallons of this stuff fast.

Good question and no, not necessarily. Cream would mean like “cream of the crop” or be an actual cream syrup made from heavy cream. There is no single definition or flavor profile for cream. In this case it means it is a more complex flavorful drink than just regular vanilla on its own. In many cream sodas, like orange cream or strawberry and cream, the cream part was just the vanilla. Some vanilla creams would have cinnamon or clove too, but I just went with nutmeg and lemon since they are also some of the flavors used to add extra flavor to vanilla cream sodas and I thought they sounded good.

Most original comment I’ve ever received.

@@VintageAmericanCocktails Love the recipes! Ordered a lot of stuff online to try making my own sarsaparilla & root beer. Also love your attention to the recipes’ details and historical background

Thank you! Music has always been my biggest struggle. In my head I image some studio ghibli-esk music but never find it. And copyright strikes hit you SO fast for using music. Even if you think it’s in the public domain. And licensing is a pain too, because the license is valid only as long as you continue to keep paying for it monthly. I agree with you and it’s definitely the area I feel the videos are the weakest. I’m just going to have to spend a few days and try and work something better out. I need to befriend a pianist lol.

Exactly like coke. It’s crazy that such a small diluted amount of oil can carry so much flavor but it does. Unfortunately now I have a ton of coke flavoring I don’t know what to do with. Sometimes I’ll add 2 or 3 drops to soda water to make a flavored soda water. Thank you! Glad you liked it.

I thought that too before I started making homemade soda syrups but it’s amazingly full flavor. I’ve read a bunch of old soda books from the 1800s and everyone had their own methods and style. There are many similarities but also many differences. The method I’ve settled on and prefer is the one John Pemberton used of making 5% flavoring solutions and adding 1.5 ml per kg of syrup. That has resulted in the most consistently and pleasant tasting sodas to me. I believe it’s based on some pharmaceuticals practices during the 1800s but it makes great sodas. But to and your question this has the same level of flavor as a soda you would get from a bottle, but fresher.