Supplies: Making homemade soda yourself-getting started.

So, ready to make your own soda? There are a few supplies you'll need, and why you'll need them. Most of these items should be pretty readily available to you in your local area, but I've provided you with links so that you may purchase those things you can't find.
1 large Stock Pot (I recommend at least an 8 qt.)-if you make gallon batches, this will give you room to stir and strain if necessary without worrying about spilling over the side. You can go bigger if you want to make larger batches, but to start off with it's a good guideline.

1 case(24x) of 12oz Amber long neck bottles. Each gallon batch you make will yield about 10 full bottles and 1 tester bottle(1 gallon=128 oz.), so you'll have enough bottles to make two separate batches. These bottles are really thick as they are intended for use in making homemade beer, so it's really unlikely you will run across exploding bottle problems. You can also use 2x 2 liter bottles that have been rinsed and sanitized beforehand for each 1 gallon batch, but if you're working with extracts they can stain the bottles and leave them with the flavor of the extract, plus you might find some of the chemicals from the bottles seeping into your brew, creating off flavors. However, these have their use if you really want to avoid exploding bottles.

1 Ladle to help fill your bottles. I recommend stainless steel over plastic to ensure proper sterilization-the last thing you want is a spoiled batch due to some unseen bacteria.

1 Funnel with Strainer for filling your bottles. The strainer will come in handy reducing the amount of unwanted material in each bottle. Remember to check and clear it after every couple of bottles.

Getting a pail with spigot, tubing and siphon(like the one from my New Toy article) make life much easier when you move into larger batches, but if you're making 1 gallon batches it's a pain in the ass because you need to lean the bucket forward to get the batch to drain through the tubing under 1 gallon. The funnel/ladle method is a little time consuming, but yields the best results for 12 oz. bottles. You can skip the ladle completely if you're just using 2 liter bottles, but you probably have a ladle in your kitchen already anyways.

1 bottle of Rainbow Soda Extracts, your preferred flavor. It's easiest to start off with an extract to give you an idea if you're going to like brewing homemade soda for yourself, and also gives you consistent results over using your own ingredients. If you're a fan of Faygo ROCK N RYE, you can mix equal parts Homebrew Cola & Homebrew Cream Soda and get a pretty good clone.

1 C&H Pure Cane White Sugar, 10 lb. Cane sugar gives the best flavor, and a 10 lb. bag is enough for roughly 10 gallons of homemade soda. More or less depending on your sweetness preference, but 2 cups(which is about 1 lb.) of sugar per gallon is a pretty standard amount. That'll yield about 38 g sugar/12 oz. bottle. Beet sugar will work as well, and you can always consider other flavoring alternatives-honey, brown sugar, molasses, agave nectar, stevia, equal, splenda, or sweet n low. Various amounts of these can be used or combined for different flavors. Start off with whatever is conveniently available though.

1 package of ale yeast. I have previously recommended use of champagne yeast, but have recently come to find out that ale yeast will usually shut itself down when the pressure inside the bottle becomes too high, as it is no longer a friendly environment for the yeast to multiply. This means there is almost no chance of exploding bottles.

1 Measuring Spoon Set. It is absolutely necessary to have 1/8 tsp. measuring spoon so that you can measure out your yeast-this is all that is required for a 1 gallon batch. It's good to have measuring spoons for a variety of reasons, but that one is a must have.

1 Pyrex 2-Cup Measuring Cup. Perfect size for measuring out your sugar. After using it for your sugar, you can also put 1/4 cup of bath-water warm(about 100 degrees) water in the bottom along with your yeast to kick start your yeast.

Gold Crown Bottle Caps or Black Bottle Caps to cap your bottles.
Bottle Capper - Red Baron for Homebrew You can also buy a Bench Bottle Capper, but it's three times as expensive and works just as well. The bench capper is a little easier to operate, but it's a small amount of convenience for the price-and not really recommended when you're first starting out.

That should cover everything you need to get started. Most of the supplies are probably already sitting around your house, and most of the supplies that aren't should be readily available at your local homebrew store.
Coming soon is an article walking you through the process of making your own first batch, if you haven't already done so.

Recipe: Homemade Soda from Syrup

This past long weekend we were invited to our neighbor's house for a 4th of July BBQ, and my wife knew instantly what we were bringing-Mojitos.
It's a favorite drink of ours, as I'm a huge fan of white rum and mint, and a former neighbor of ours introduced us to the magic of mojitos around 3.5 years ago(using mint from their garden). We carried on this tradition of using our own mint in our drinks by making sure we had mint available to us at every house/apartment we've lived in since.
If you're not aware of the magical tonic that is a mojito, it is white rum with mint syrup, lime juice and topped off with club soda. So, after my wife made her homemade mint syrup(fresh mint from the front yard), we had plenty of club soda left over. What was I to do? I'll tell you what I did, I decided to make some homemade soda in the most simple of fashions-I made a syrup to add to the club soda for deliciousness.
I got out our quart saucepan, and put in 2 cups of water, 2 cups of white sugar, 1/2 cup of cane sugar, and combined them in the pan. Next, I needed flavor, so before I turned the water on I looked around the house-there was a rind from a tangerine that my lovely wife had eaten as a quick and nutritious snack on her way out the door, and as if by serendipity my still 2 year-old waltzed in the kitchen and asked for an "orange". She hates the skins/rinds of all fruits, so it gave me more raw material to work with.
So, I ended up having the rinds of two tangerines, and tossed those into the pan with the water and sugar. I turned the heat to medium-high, and began using a spoon to alternate between stirring the sugar and pressing the tangerine rinds against the bottom and sides of the pan to help get the oils out. After bringing the water to a boil, I reduced the mix to low heat and continued to stir and spoon-press the rinds. I tasted a bit of the batch, and noticed it was lacking a little in flavor. Since I was already working with citrus, and didn't want to peel another tangerine that wasn't going to be immediately eaten, I grabbed our bottle of lemon juice from the refrigerator, added a tablespoon and stirred it in a bit more. It turned out really well-slight hint of tangerine with a bit of sour bite, and super sweet.
I skimmed the tangerine rinds from the top of the pan and put them in 2 mason jars(this produced about 24 ounces of syrup). You might get a stronger flavor of tnagerine if you leave it in the syrup jars, but I didn't want to bother with fishing rinds out of any glasses-better to garnish with a fresh slice of citrus.
I played the waiting game to allow time to cool, poured the syrup into two small glasses for the girls, topped it off with club soda, and took a little sip. Quite tasty, although a bit too sweet for my liking. There ratio was about 1/3 syrup to 2/3 soda, so I made myself a glass that was about 1/4-1/5 syrup and the rest soda, turned out alot better, had more of the sour I was looking for.
The next time I work with a syrup base, I'm going to make sure to work with more fruit rinds to get a stronger flavor, but for a good, quick(about 15-20 minutes total prep and cook time, not including the cooling) sweet/sour treat, it hit the spot on one of these gloriously hot, summer days.

Review: Gale's Root Beer

Recently I took a much needed break from work to enjoy an amazing vacation with my family. We packed up the car and the kids(the car was so full we had to throw one up on the luggage rack-she didn't seem to mind too much until it started raining...) and headed out on the open road. Day four of our five day trip landed us in Astoria, Or-a hop, skip and a jump away from Seaside-a beautiful little town with a nice stretch of beach and a downtown set up specifically for tourists(particularly those with children).
Anyways, after many stops at toy stores, sweets shops, and ice cream parlors, I ended up ducking into a place that boasted a large selection of "old-fashioned sodas". I knew I was in luck. I perused the five large refrigerated display stands stocked with a large variety of sodas, and made my first selection based upon a need to try an old-fashioned brew that had as of yet eluded my grasp- Moxie Original Elixir(review coming soon). However, for my next selection, I returned to the case dedicated exclusively(!) to Root Beers. There were Root Beers of many kinds, but most of them could be found in my local grocer's aisle. I narrowed it down to a few I had never seen before, and ultimately decided upon Gales Root Beer. The fun label made it pop out at me, and I picked it up to read the fine print- a sad but charming story of Chef Gale Gand moving to England and having her "root beer supplies dry up", and how she proceeded to get a terrier, name him "Rootie"(possibly because the dog tasted like Root Beer-the world shall never know), and then make do with the ingredients she had available to her at the time. Those ingredients? Cinnamon, Vanilla, and Ginger. Upon learning of a Root Beer that was formulated with those three delicious ingredients, I became excited, and my tongue began to dance in my mouth. So I scooped the bottle up, dropped the money on the counter($4.50 for two bottles of soda? Extortion!) and absconded with my find to the car.
Later on that evening I twisted off the cap, took a whiff(cinnamon with the slight hint of vanilla sweetness), and took a big gulp- that triggered my memory of my first attempt at making a soda recipe, and a return to that awful taste and feel of too much cinnamon. I took a few more swigs, and realized that the vanilla balanced it our, and the real sugar mellowed it out enough to make it mostly palatable. It wasn't nearly carbonated enough for the flavor, and just left me with regret of plopping down $2.25 on such a half-assed concoction. My soda-loving 3 year old even turned down the opportunity to have another sip, turning down the proffered drink with a confident "No thanks, dad. That soda is icky."
I also feel like I was deceived-there was not a single hint of ginger in this brew, not a faint hint of ginger's aroma nor slight bite of it's spice. It was just...not gingery at all. I feel that cutting back on the cinnamon and increasing the ginger would have saved it, but I still wouldn't call this a root beer if I had made it. A shitty cola, yes, but not a root beer.

Packaging- 3/5
Awesome Illustration, fascinating blurb, quite unique- but labelled as Root Beer when it so clearly is not.

Taste- 3/7
It wasn't completely awful, but I made only slightly worse on my first try, and this was supposedly formulated by a chef.

Aroma- 3/5
Cinnamony and sweet-gave me hopes of a carbonated Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Soda-Loving Daughter's assessment- Icky/3

Overall- 9(icky)/20

Buy Gale's Root Beer
Sub-par soda, but not the worst. Worst root beer? By far.