I was 10 when I began to hang out in our raisin packing house. There was a Pepsi machine there and
I can stil remember the tang and sweet taste of Pepsi from the machine. Pepsi's don't taste that way
anymore but I had one that did recently.

I used some non-sugar sweetened Pepsi and warmed it for several hours to kill the sweetness from
Aspartame. I did this because I intended to add white sugar to it. Once I added white sugar the
taste I remember came back. Or nearly so. The 6oz cold bottles added some kind of flavor too I think.
J/k

But the corn sweetener does not add the same zing I remember. so waht to do?

1. Make your own soft drinks.

You can buy cheaply the materials to make a mountain dew or similar soft drink.
It consists of

water, white sugar, citric acid, lemon oil, and if you need bubbles you can use a piece of dry ice.

Look you don't need the bubbles. So forget the dry ice.

And the above cost is about 4 cents per 12 oz glass compared to a bad tasting, IMHO, soft drink made
with a poor quality sugar and costing so much more.

At least try it.

You can buy citric acid in the Kosher area of a store. Or ask the buyer for it. It's often called sour salt.

Another reason to have it around is that when you cut fresh fruit like apples a bit of citric acid on the cut
part keeps it from browning.

When you look at labels you'll see citric acid often used. It's a pH modifier to make the food acidic and
help to reduce bacterial growth. It's safe and comes from citrus fruits.

If you bought 10lb or 100lb of it and kept it dry it would never 'wear out' or become old. It's stable as
it is. It's a salt. It lasts as long as salt would last. How long? 50 years. 100 year 1000 years.

I hate an ad I saw recently. It said, spend $40 or $20 on these product and we'll send 10% to the breast
cancer fund. I looked at the products and they were nearly all soft drinks.

Consider how I feel when I see so many people who are ignorant about something so easy to make.

If you look at an old book from the UK where people could buy everything from morphine to the chemicals
I mentioned above you'd realize that most every product on the shelf is made in the same ways our
great grand parents who were 100 miles from a city made their medicines, drinks, and foods.

Did it take a bit more work? yes. A lot more work? no.

Good luck. I hate to see money wasted and especially on products which don't taste as good as they
did 40 years ago.

Maybe the soda makers feel guilty, that's why the donation. The flavor of soda has been changed greatly by the addition of the non-sugar products and increase of corn syrup in others. I won't get started on the large amount of caffeine in other types of soda. It is very expensive to buy an all natural soda. Maybe we sould try making more of our fond memorie products like your soda. Thanks.

citric acid from soft drinks seriously and irreversibly eroded my tooth enamel to a dangerous extent (per all dentists i've seen in the last 8 years).

i DO need bubbles - that was most of the point for me of drinking soft drinks! for the bubbles now, i drink naturally sparkling water (san pellegrino) in glass bottles (to avoid BPA from plastics).

however, i support any exhortation to avoid aspartame/neutrasweet - it's bad stuff.

Boylan sodas are made with regular sugar all year long:
http://www.boylanbottling.com/

The Cane Sugar / No HFCS Soft Drinks Thread.

andre1000 said:
When you look at labels you'll see citric acid often used. It's a pH modifier to make the food acidic and
help to reduce bacterial growth. It's safe and comes from citrus fruits.

If you bought 10lb or 100lb of it and kept it dry it would never 'wear out' or become old. It's stable as
it is. It's a salt. It lasts as long as salt would last. How long? 50 years. 100 year 1000 years.

As an actual scientist, I think your post is factually lacking-- citric acid (C6H8O7) is an organic compound and is no where near as stable as table salt, NaCl, which is a stable ionic compound-- which 1000 years from now will still be NaCl (ignoring miniscule amounts lost due to radioactive decay)... Citric acid is likely stable under ideal circumstances, but kept at room temperature and "dry" is not ideal... It is disingenuous to suggest that someone could stockpile this chemical and expect it would remain something you should trust to eat.

A little googling suggests that the amount of citric acid present in most citrus sodas is on the order of 0.2 oz - 2.0 oz per 6 gallons of soda, which leads me to believe that it might be very easy to over-do it and add too much to your home brew mix, with potential side effects (that have been mentioned in this thread already) of damaging tooth enamel or worse...

While we're at it, yes, citric acid is present in citrus fruits; however, the vast majority of citric acid today comes from Aspergillus niger (a mold) fed on a sugar solution produced in industrial processes.

I don't have any problem with anyone making their own soda, but to do so without more thought and knowledge than you've put into this post is potentially dangerous.

I tries to make sprite using a lemon and a lime.

It tasted like sh@t. I think theres more to it than that.

Looking at the can of Pepsi I am drinking, High fructose corn syrup is near the top of the list of ingredients, while sugar is near the bottom. I think that is the "norm" for most soft drinks.

A few months ago, you could buy the "Throwback" versions of Mountain Dew and Pepsi, made with real sugar instead of corn syrup.
Here's the weird part; the Mountain Dew REALLY tastes (at first) like DIET, with an odd aftertaste that takes getting used to.
Also, the normal Mountain Dew is made with Orange Juice, but not so the Throwback version. And in my experience, the Throwback version also seems to have less caffeine, since I can go a day or two without any and not suffer debilitating headaches. It seems to taste smoother, with a bit less carbonation (some say it tastes "flat" but that's going too far). Hopefully they'll do a run of Throwback every year, since I'm hooked, and only have about a year's supply left!

NantucketSunrise said:citric acid from soft drinks seriously and irreversibly eroded my tooth enamel to a dangerous extent (per all dentists i've seen in the last 8 years).

Since there was more than one dentist I'll begrudgingly accept that they weren't just BSing you to get you to pay for expensive treatments, but I still doubt their diagnostics. Unless you were drinking several gallons of soda/day, you most likely just have genetically defective teeth. Maybe their strategy is to induce guilt so that you are now more lavish in treating your "irreversibly" damaged teeth...until they extract them.