Here it is.
You asked, I answered.
You said stop complaining about everyone
else's coffee drinks.
Why don't you make one yourself?
You think you can do better?
Publish a recipe you said.
Okay, I will.
This in front of me is the first of perhaps many recipes
that I'll offer of coffee sodas.
Now this is a pretty simple coffee soda.
This is coffee focused with a little twist in there.
Before I drink this, let me tell you about the process
that I went through to get to sitting here
with this bottle in front of you.
So we're gonna try and make a coffee soda,
and there's a lot of things we need to decide along the way.
Do we need to use espresso for this?
Or should it be like filter coffee?
I don't really know.
But either way I know that the first thing I have to do
is make some simple syrup.
I'm gonna make a two to one syrup
because this is gonna be a sweet soda.
It's gonna be delicious.
We need a way of adding sugar to it.
Now I know one to one's easier to make,
quicker to make, but I don't want the dilution later on.
So it's two to one.
We just wanna heat this until it dissolves basically.
So nicely dissolved, let it cool down.
We'll decant it in a minute,
and we'll get rid of this hot plate,
and we'll make some filter coffee.
So let's talk about brewing coffee.
I'm gonna do two different brews.
I'm gonna do a pour over.
Now for a pour over I'm gonna brew a little bit heavier.
I want my end strength to be about 1.5%.
So to do that, I'm gonna use 75 grams per liter,
a heavier throw.
A couple reasons, I want a bit more strength
in the end brew partially because there'll be a tiny bit
of dilution as we go, and also just for intensity of taste.
But I'm gonna brew a pretty traditional V60.
Same technique that I always use,
and just make sure that the coffee is well extracted.
Once that's done, I'll put it to the side
and I'll let it cool down, and we can carry on
with making our espresso drinks.
When it comes to the espresso of choice,
in fact, the coffee of choice for either of these things.
I am not leaning towards a crazy, funky, fruity thing.
I am leaning towards a sweet kind of classic coffee,
coffee kind of thing.
I think for what I have in mind for a delicious coffee soda
I don't want it to be too weird.
I think there's probably a recipe down the line
for something weird, but not today.
So I'm gonna brew a couple of espressos, a double shot.
I'm gonna use 19 in, 40 grams out.
And if I do a good job,
I should end up with an espresso of about 9.5% strength.
Now that's obviously much stronger than the filter coffee.
I'm gonna dilute that down afterwards
to a kind of matching dilution.
41 grams, that's workable.
Now this is I'm sure a very delicious espresso,
but it's got some problems
when it comes to our desired use of a soda.
Well, we need to filter it.
We need to paper filter this espresso
to get rid of any suspended material.
Now that suspended material is a problem
when it comes to carbonation.
It provides nucleation points,
and it will cause the CO2 to come out of solution.
It'll make it really fizzy, and frothy, and problematic.
So we have to paper filter our espresso
to clean it up, get rid of all that stuff,
so it's bye bye crema,
bye bye any suspended material in there,
we just want that clean, intense coffee flavor.
To do that, all I'm gonna do is pour it through
an unrinsed V60 paper and it should drain through a nice,
clear liquid,
which is what we want.
Now, this'll often happen
when you're trying to filter espresso,
it'll just kind of choke, and you just have to be patient.
One of the reasons it's clogging
is because there's so many fine pieces
from that espresso actually clogging up the filter paper.
Those things that we're trying to get rid of here.
Now, I tend to find that this is probably as annoying
as it is, a better solution than pressing it
through an aeropress.
Because in that situation, I tend to find
that you still get more insoluble material coming
through those thin aeropress papers, especially at pressure.
Okay, that's good enough for me.
We could use a refractometer
but I don't wanna waste any of this at this point.
If we presume it's about 9.5% strength,
we've got about 34 grams there,
then you can work out how much soluble material
is actually inside this cup.
And if you want the end result to be 1.5% strength
then you can do the maths about how much liquid to add,
which is about 180 grams of liquid.
I'm just gonna use some good tasting,
clean mineral water that I like, to dilute it down.
So we've got one of our two beverages here.
We need to do a couple more things to it now.
We need to sweeten it up,
and then we need to add a few key flavors.
Now I've been thinking about this,
and I really don't want to get in the way
of the coffee flavor.
I wanna give it room to breathe,
I wanna almost emphasize it.
So after I've added the sugar,
there's something else I wanna add
just in a tiny quantity to see if it can just lift up
that kind of coffee flavor, warm it up a little bit more.
But first things first, our sugar syrup.
So I've got 215 grams of beverage,
I'm gonna add 30 grams of simple syrup,
of which 20 grams of that is sugar.
So it'll give me 20 out of the,
what will then become 245 grams,
which is about the sort of starting sweetness
I wanna work with.
Some soft drinks get all the way up to about 10% sugar,
but they're generally counteracting quite a lot of acidity.
I'm not sure we're gonna have that much acidity here
and I don't wanna go too too sweet.
Squeeze bottles are the best.
So there is our espresso.
Now we need to create the same sweetness
with our filter coffee.
This is a larger batch, so I'm gonna need to add
more simple syrup to kinda get the same recipe.
So I'm gonna add 60 grams here.
To about 440 mils,
meaning that we'll have about 40 grams out of 500.
'Bout 8%.
Now for the next phase of testing.
My theory is that a small amount,
just a tiny amount of chocolate bitters
will add a nice amount of bitterness to it,
and also just round out the flavors,
soften them up a little bit.
But I don't know actually,
which chocolate bitters I wanna use for this.
So I've got three different ones here.
We're gonna do samples in two rounds.
So we'll do filter coffee first.
We'll pour three filter coffees,
I'll add just a little dash initially just to taste,
and then see which bitters I prefer.
And then run the same test with the espresso based beverage.
Let's see what we got here.
Okay, a little bit too much citrus.
Not unpleasant.
That finishes quite well.
Okay, that finishes quite well.
This one I'm just not into
I think the Malagasy chocolate bitters,
too much citrus I think it's out.
This is interesting.
But again too much citrus up front.
This one, pretty subtle but it actually does
quite nice things for the finish.
This one, I think is it.
I have to be careful with this though
because a heavy hand is gonna mess things up.
Now I'll just repeat that experiment very quickly
with the espresso based version of this.
Few drops.
This is way too much.
To put a dash into an espresso cup size is too much,
but it's about flavor marriage.
Nope.
Dominantly, dominantly, citrus.
Yeah, okay.
Yes.
Unquestionably, this one here.
And I think having tasted the two now,
I'm leaning towards the espresso version.
Like a really nice amount of bitterness,
a little bit of acid, nice intensity of flavor.
I might actually go just a little stronger.
So in that next round I might dilute that a little bit less.
One more addition that I need to make up really quickly.
It's a pretty simple thing to make.
And that's a salt solution, a saline solution.
We're gonna mix 20 grams of salt into 80 grams of water.
So it's a 20% solution that way.
We're gonna use just a little bit of this,
'cause just salt does wonderful things in tiny amounts
where you can't really detect the saltiness of it.
So we're gonna make some of that up quickly
and then get it into a dropper bottle.
Then I pull a fresh round of espressos.
I'll strain them, I'll dilute them,
and then get them down to two degrees Celsius.
So now we need to talk about carbonation,
which is actually so important to me.
Now, one of the first things about carbonation
is that you need your liquid to be cool.
There's a kind of peak in carbonation
in terms of the ability of water to dissolve CO2,
at around two degrees Celsius.
As such, what I'm gonna do is decant this
into this plastic bottle that I need for carbonation.
I'm gonna put a temperature probe in it,
and then I'm gonna put it in the freezer
so that I can track its temperature.
Make sure I grab it when it hits about the right point.
So it's now time, this being nice and cold to carbonate it.
So what we need to do is get rid of as much air as possible
'cause that gets in the way of good carbonation.
So we're just gonna squeeze a bunch of air out
and put this little special cap on.
And then I've got with me from home,
a kind of carbonation rig,
that uses like a big CO2 tank.
So to our emptyish of air bottle, open that.
And then we add our CO2.
So this is full of CO2.
What we're actually gonna do now is drain it out of CO2.
We're gonna depressurize it and repressurize it again.
Just 'cause we wanna make sure we've got maximum CO2,
minimum air in this thing.
Then we're gonna chill it a bit more
and then we're gonna drink it.
Let's have a little taste.
It's very fizzy.
Now coffee has foaming agents in it
which is why you get crema, which is what's going on here.
Let's just have a gentle pour.
Hm.
Oh that is fizzy.
Okay, it's not perfect yet.
Wow, that's fizzy.
I love carbonation, I really do.
That is really fizzy.
It is in need of a bit more coffee flavor.
The sweetness is about right.
Could do with a touch less bitterness.
Now I'm not gonna tell you too much
about how that tastes,
because based on what I'm tasting here,
I'm gonna make some recipe tweaks.
I'm gonna brew some more espresso,
I'm gonna rebuild this sort of from the ground up,
tweak it, make it really delicious.
And then I know what I have to do.
I know what I have to change.
I think I can make just a really tasty, fresh coffee soda.
I'm gonna do that.
I'm gonna make that new batch up,
gonna nail down that recipe.
I'm gonna publish that recipe on my website,
a website that I built with this video sponsor,
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All right, welcome back.
We are ready to taste this thing.
The, I hope final iteration of this thing.
The recipe that will be on my website link down below.
I don't have a bottle opener,
so it's gonna be a screwdriver effort
to get this thing open,
'cause for some reason I thought I should cap it
'cause it looked cool.
And it's like a bottle of soda,
should get a label next time.
Jobs done.
Ooh, now smell wise, you get like a little citrus
and then a nice kinda coffee hit on the nose.
Now this is gonna be a fresh soda.
And by that I mean this isn't gonna keep for a long time.
This isn't pasteurized for one,
and two the coffee will begin to degrade over time.
These are definitely fun to make in a batch.
I would recommend doing that,
but I would drink them pretty quickly
before they develop that kinda stale,
unpleasant coffee taste that you find
in a lot of bad cold brew.
To carbonate this you don't need
a carbonation rig like mine,
you could use a SodaStream,
or you could use like a cream whipper with CO2 cartridges
instead of the cream whipping cartridges
that you normally use with those.
There's lots of ways to carbonate.
I just like to do it at high pressures
in large volumes 'cause I can.
Shall we have a taste.
Oh yeah.
Now this recipe, this drink is only as good
as the espresso that you start with.
Like it's a really a reflection of that thing.
I didn't go with like a wacky or wild
natural or anything like that.
I went with a clean washed coffee
that is sweet and delicious.
And as a result, this beverage is sweet and delicious.
Now, that little hit of citrus from those coffee bitters
with that nice little chocolatey finish there,
that is really yummy.
This is good.
This on a cold day would hit the spot.
Sweetness is nice, carbonation is nice.
This isn't a super high level of carbonation.
I haven't gone crazy on this.
If you're bored you can weigh how much CO2 you're adding,
it's actually a measurable thing.
Very carbonated beverages,
you'll add about six grams of CO2 per liter.
So you can weigh before and after carbonation,
and actually see the difference.
Here we're at about three I would say.
So pleasantly fizzy, sparkling,
but not like an angry, angry fizz.
Then you can end up with a kind of a raspy,
a harsher kind of carbonation
that I don't think this really warrants
or actually works that well with coffee.
This is pretty good.
At this point what would I change?
What would I improve?
I'm pretty happy with this.
I think it's pretty good.
It's restricted by having to be fresh
but it's nonetheless pretty enjoyable.
If I could find a slightly less citrusy chocolate bitters
that was a little bit more classic chocolate,
I might use that over this one.
I think this works really well
and it gives it a kind of interesting coffee
cola quality that's quite nice.
But I could do with a little bit more chocolate.
You could probably add some caramel color
for more of a classic cola look
if you wanted to do that.
But this, it's pretty good, I think you should try it.
If you do try it, then I want you to tell me
what coffee you used in it.
How was it?
And don't skimp on the little details,
don't skimp on the saline,
don't skimp on doing this stuff right,
don't skimp on clarifying your espresso as much as you can.
All of that stuff adds up to a really nice, delicious,
balanced, enjoyable, little beverage.
And I hope you enjoy it
'cause I really had some fun making this.
So go, make yourself a delicious coffee soda,
and let me know your results down in the comments below.
As always, thank you so much for watching
and I hope you have a great day.