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Homemade Soda

April 26, 2010 – 10:08 am

Lately I’ve been experimenting a lot with making summery beverages. I started making a pitcher of (decaf) iced tea every morning, all different kinds, experimenting with blending teas and herbs and flavors… a spoonful of honey here, a squeeze of lemon or a splash of orange there.

One of my favorite beverage treats is ginger brew, or ginger ale. My favorite one on the market is Reed’s Extra Ginger Brew. It is so spicy and gingery and refreshing — you can feel the bite of the ginger in your throat. Last week when I went to the NYC restaurant Candle 79 for my birthday dinner (a whole post on that coming soon), I had this amazing homemade ginger soda. It was like the best, gingeriest, pungentest, mintiest ginger ale you ever had. I loved it, and am trying to re-create it at home. So far I haven’t quite got it right — my experiments don’t seem to have the gingery-ness of the C79 beverage. But I have produced some pretty tasty results.

My most successful attempt was a loose following of this recipe, which involves making a ginger syrup and mixing it with soda water or club soda. I’m a bit intimidated by the whole “brewing” business, which involves fermentation, so I don’t know how far I’ll go with that. But I definitely have to figure out how to get the strong ginger bite into the flavor of the soda. I know Reed’s adds some pineapple to their flavorings so I’ll try that too.

Making kombucha tea soda is also on my agenda for this summer. That will likely be my first foray into fermentation. Until then, I’ll keep experimenting with strong ginger syrups. If you know how Candle 79 does it, leave a comment and let me know!