Brew Better Soda at Home

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Make your own root beer, ginger ale and grape soda with these easy recipes.

For a delicious and refreshing soda, it's hard to beat one you've brewed yourself. Generations of self-sufficient folks have been making their own beverages from local plants, often from the roots that give "root" beer and "ginger" ale their names. Today's home-brewers use many of the same soda ingredients as the old-fashioned recipes did, and the results are a delicious array of flavors with which artificial soft drinks just can't compete.

Homemade soda is simple and fun to make, and remarkably inexpensive. It's even cheaper to make most homemade soda recipes than it is to buy commercial colas. As an added benefit, many homemade sodas are healthier, too. When soda is made with all natural ingredients, you get all the flavor and healthful properties of the herbs and spices in the recipe, which might include ginger, anise, hops or licorice root. Natural sodas also contain yeast, which is a great source of B-complex vitamins. The most important health benefit of making your own soda, however, is that you can control the amount of sugar. Most commercial colas contain the equivalent of 7 to 9 teaspoons of sugar for a 12ounce soda. When you make your own, you can add sweeteners to taste, and it's easy to brew great-tasting soda with onethird less sugar than commercial brands.

BREWING BASICS

Store-bought soda is made with sugar - usually in the inexpensive form of corn syrup - water and artificial flavorings, and force-carbonated with carbon dioxide:

The gas is pumped directly into the beverage. In homemade soda, the main ingredients also are sugar and water, but in this mixture, the carbon dioxide is produced naturally through fermentation: Once the other soda ingredients have been mixed together, yeast is added to the beverage. Then, it's allowed to sit at room temperature for a day or two so the yeast cells can consume some of the sugar and form carbon dioxide bubbles as a byproduct. To retain this carbon dioxide, the soda must be stored in sturdy bottles.

A similar process is used to brew alcoholic beverages such as beer; the main difference is that soda isn't allowed to ferment for nearly as long. Instead, as soon as soda becomes carbonated, it must be refrigerated to slow the action of the yeast cells and prevent them from consuming all the sugar. Because the fermentation cycle is cut short, one glass of homemade soda usually contains less than 1 percent alcohol. If you started drinking your own soda by the gallon, the sugar would go to your head long before the alcohol would.

NECESSARY EQUIPMENT