DIY soft drinks

Cola, orange soda, and almond soda!
2020-08-08 (last update: 2026-04-10) / blinry / CC BY-SA 4.0 / recipe

In 2020, I started making my own soft drinks, including a sugar-free, caffeine-free cola! If you’re just looking for the current recipes, you can find them on GitHub. They were inspired by recipes like Open Cola and Cube Cola.

Otherwise, read on for “log book”-style instructions and pictures of my first attempts, which have been adapted from this Mastodon thread.

Cola, first batch

Here’s what we’ll need:

An overview of the required ingredients: Citric acid, gum arabic, caramel color, and sweetener.

We start by making a flavor emulsion from essential oils! These oils are extremely strong, and can cause skin irritations, so if you want to be safe, wear latex gloves for this step!

I'm holding a bottle of an essential oil. It has safety warnings printed on it.

We also need super small quantities. In this attempt, I’m aiming for:

For measuring, I have a 1 ml syringe:

I'm holding a 1 ml syringe.

There! In total, we have about 2 ml of essential oil. This will lend flavor to about 9 L of cola!

A little bit of yellow oil in a plastic container.

But oils don’t dissolve in water, right? They would just float on the surface!

So what we’ll add next is gum arabic, a natural emulsifier, that will help the oil form tiny, tiny droplets that stay dispersed in water!

I'm holding a bag of 100 grams of ground gum arabic. It's a brown powder.

Combine 2 g of gum arabic, 4 ml water, and our oil mixture with a hand mixer. Keep mixing until it emulsifies, it will take on a milky brown color and the oily phase will disappear. This took me about 5 minutes.

I'm using a hand mixer in a big plastic bowl on a bit of milky brown substance.

Next, we add: 40 ml of caramel color, which will give the cola its dark appearance.

I'm holding a bottle of dark brown caramel color.

As well as 5 g citric acid, and an additional 10 ml of water. You can also add caffeine at this point, but one of the main motivations for me to make my own cola is to have cola without caffeine (it gives me headaches).

I'm holding a bag of citric acid, small transparent grains.

Stop mixing when it starts smiling at you! :D This is our finished cola concentrate. It smells delicious!

A thick dark brown liquid in a big plastic bowl. It looks a bit like a smiling face.

Other recipes would now integrate this into sugar syrup made from 1 kg of sugar, but I want to try a variation using artificial sweeteners, for dieting reasons. This is a combination of sodium cyclamate and saccharin, which is pretty common in Germany. I’ll use 70 ml.

I'm holding a bottle of transparent liquid sweetener.

This gives us about 120 ml of the finished cola syrup! \o/ I’ve been following the Cube-Cola recipe.

I'm holding a plastic container containing some brown liquid.

Because this is still a very concentrated solution and hard to handle, I’m diluting it down to 1 L. In theory, this should give a nice cola when diluted further in a ratio of 1:8. First taste test coming up!

A 1 L bottle of dark brown liquid. A hand-written label says "Cube-Cola with Cyclamate + Caccharin".

It’s good! It’s really good! The sweetness is just right for me, and the oil blend tastes nice and cola-y! :)

I poured myself a glass, diluted it further, and added an ice cube.

I like my drinks really sour, so I might add another… 10 g of citric acid to this batch. There is a slightly bitter aftertaste, which I attribute to the artificial sweetener I’m using.

I might also tweak the oil ratios to accentuate the citrus flavors a bit more in the next batch. And I thought this would be too much food coloring, but it seems pretty perfect!

What I’d be really excited to try is making other flavors: Orange soda! Cherry soda! Almond & apricot soda! <3 The problems is that I don’t know of many DIY recipes for sodas except cola, which is surprising:

Open Soda (Note: site is no longer online as of 2026…) has two pretty weird ones (including a bubble gum soda?!), but that’s pretty much all I found. There still seems to be potential for reverse engineering! :)

And here are two more resources I found while preparing my ingredients today: Jan Krüger’s blog post about tweaking cola recipes and Richard Grove’s Notes on Making Cola, which go deeper into food chemistry!

Cola, second batch

Made a second batch of cola syrup without caramel color. It’s much weirder to drink than I expected.

A 1 L bottle of slightly milky liquid. Diluted in a glass it's more transparent.

I also switched to sucralose as a sweetener, hoping that it would have less aftertaste. Instead of 1000 g sugar in the original recipe, I used 1.6 g sucralose, which is ridiculous, but it’s still too sweet for my taste. :O

A silver bag containing 100 g of sucralose.

And I made a tool upgrade! It’s important to get these small quantities right…

I measured out excactly 1 g of sucralose on a high-precision scale.

Almond-flavored soft drink, first batch

This week’s batch: blood orange + almond + lime (in a 2:1:1 ratio), plus as much orange food coloring as I dared to put in! :D

An orange soft drink, in a bottle and in a glass. Next to it, the essential oils I used.

I cut the amount of sucralose in half – still a bit too sweet for my taste. Had to completely guess the oil ratios, but I’m happy with how it turned out! My whole apartment smells like marzipan now. <3

This time, when I did the mixing in a big plastic bowl, I noticed some floating stuff on the concentrate, which I assume are tiny plastic shavings produced by the hand mixer? I filtered them out, and might switch to glass or metal containers.

Cola, third batch (0.1.0)

In today’s cola batch, I reduced the amount of sucralose further to 0.4 g, added 0.07 g vanillin, as well as a bit more cassia oil. Good stuff! I call it “Syntez-Cola”, because I combined ideas from Cube-Cola and Jan Krüger’s recipe! :)

A bottle of cola sirup in the middle of equipment and ingredients that were used to make it.

… this is the point where I should start a blog post, and a Git repo with version numbers and a changelog, I guess. :P (Edit 2026: Here you go!)

I found decaf Coca-Cola in a supermarket last week, and could do a direct taste comparison. At this point, I prefer my cola by a large margin! Coca-Cola tasted bland, like molten cola popsicles. It had an interesting dryness to it, though, which I’m not sure how to replicate.

Orange soda, first batch (0.1.0)

Made a simple orange soda today, really happy with how it turned out! I put the recipe here, along with my modified cola recipe, and the almond + blood orange drink I invented!

A yellow soft drink in a bottle and in a glass.

Almond soda, second batch (0.1.1)

blinry almond 0.1.1 contains less almond oil, to highlights the citrus flavors a bit more. Find the updated recipe here.

Two bottles of red-orange soft drink concentrate.

One of these two bottles is a version with sugar instead of sucralose. 400 g of sugar seem to be a good replacement for 0.6 g sucralose. Curious to see whether people will be able to taste the difference! :) (Edit 2026: They totally could!)

Orange soda (0.1.1)

blinry orange 0.1.1, now with 14% more orange! :D Recipe here.

Yellow fluid in a bottle labelled "blinry orange 0.1.1". Next to it is a glass with transparent yellow fluid and an ice cube.

Closing thoughts in 2026

Since these early experiments, I made a handful batches of these recipes without modification. I still think they’re really nice! Especially blinry orange is rather unique.

If you try them for yourself, I’d be happy about feedback!

And I’m still thinking what ingredients might go into a DIY Mountain Dew, or a DIY Fassbrause…

Comments

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