[ChuckMcM]

Awesome! As someone who used to drink a lot of Diet Dr. Pepper (DDP) I could easily tell how close a given can (or bottle) was to its "use by" date. This makes for a great party trick [1] but otherwise has limited utility.

It also made for some socially awkward situations where, when visiting friends, they would want to have drinks on hand that their guests like and would go out of their way to get some DDP for me, not checking the date, and then serve out of date soda which tasted horrible.

Not surprising the rate of hydrolysis is temperature dependent so if you keep things refrigerated they last longer, but if you leave them out on the back porch in the summer where they get warm they go 'non-sweet' relatively quickly.

I switched to water (or tea if I want caffeine) with diet sweetener in packets (which doesn't go bad because no pesky water to 'unzip' it). I wrote to the Dr. Pepper company once and suggested they design their beverage so that the sweetener was dry and only released when you opened it (I got the idea from the way the Guinness folks started selling Guinness in cans with a gizmo to put a head on it when opened. Alas, nobody at the company was interested in "fixing" a non-problem, they responded (nicely) that I should just be sure to check the date and included a coupon for a free six pack. Of course at that time (and is still true around Reno) the bottler doesn't use an easily readable date code so it isn't much of a solution.

[1] And by "great" I mean the nerds all are fascinated by it and the non-nerds were nominally repulsed that someone could have such familiarity with the hydrolysis profile as to call it out by taste.

[Grustaf]

Sorry, but do you mean that you drink sweetened water?

[xboxnolifes]

May sounds weird, but is that not what tons of popular drinks basically are? Half water, half sugar, a few vitamins/electrolytes + coloring.

[Grustaf]

Well there's also flavour, makes a big difference

[orangepanda]

Tea is more than just sweetened water

[micromacrofoot]

I think they're referencing this, which does sound like sweetened water

>I switched to water (or tea if I want caffeine) with diet sweetener in packets

[ChuckMcM]

And I don't sweeten just water, but I do sweeten my tea!

[Grustaf]

That's a relief, thanks for clarifying!

[sircastor]

Your note about the sweetener packets makes me curious if diet soda syrup lasts longer. This has been a reason for me to hold off on putting together my own carbonation setup as, in spite of how much soda I drink, I still don’t think I could move through the requisite 2.5 gallons of syrup before the expiration date hit. I wonder if the aspartame suffers the same hydrolysis in syrup.

[ChuckMcM]

It does! (less water, so less hydrolysis) "name brand" syrup however isn't particularly economical at retail however[1]. Not too surprisingly there has been a rash of restaurant bankruptcies during the pandemic and so buying "used" soda fountain gear is actually pretty easy (at least in the western US) these days. I actually have an Elkay "water machine" which does carbonation (as well as chilled and not chilled still water) although its carbonation chamber is too small to give a good fizz like the commercial units do. (more Perrier like, less fountain soda like). That said there are also relatively few powder mixes that take into account carbonated water. There was an AWESOME Grape Crush one (that was sugar free) but since it tasted poorly when mixed with still water it was discontinued (having a soda water tap is not the normal situation).

One of the more interesting ideas (and also impractical) are the "mini-syrups" that are used in the multi-beverage dispensers with the touch screen at places like Movie Theaters. Good luck getting hold of those. I briefly had a line on getting them from a local AMC because I knew the manager who wasn't averse to re-selling them to me at cost but she changed jobs when the pandemic made theaters non-viable. The existing Coke branded dispensers are so loaded up with various DRM/telemetry that even if you can get one at auction (which you normally can't since they are leased, not sold) it would be quite the reverse engineering process to get it to work "disconnected" from the Coke network.

[1] Funny story about how I spent four months trying to buy Diet Dr. Pepper syrup at the "restaurant" rate (which was about 1/4th the "retail" rate) elided.

[notjulianjaynes]

One issue with those machines is the sweetener is mixed with the flavor ingredients at the fountain. That's how they fit all those flavors in a refrigerator size package. Each flavor pack is about the size of a box of mike and ikes, but there's also a "bib"(2.5 gallon bag in box)[1] of non-nutritive sweetener that's shared by all the diet flavors. Corn syrup gets routed in from a big tank in the back along with water and c02.

In practice if you wanted some kind of home setup, you'd be much better off just buying the normal box of syrup like they use in fast-food restaurants, gas stations, etc.

[1]https://www.ebay.com/itm/184564418337

[ChuckMcM]

Wow, why am I not surprised :-). If the normal boxes had been reasonably priced when I was pursuing this I would have gone that route. At the time the best I could do was a bit under 0.02/oz based on the 24 oz bottles or 2 liter bottles depending on sales. The places that would sell me syrup had the result coming in at 4.2 - 6 cents/oz which would have increased my costs considerably.

[robk]

Hello old Google coworker I had the same setup in Fort Mason in 2004 and was able to get the SF wholesaler to sell to us pretty regularly. Iirc it became a lot easier lately to just find generics on eBay and worry less about getting the hookup. Diet red bull was the holy grail but we found an okay proxy on eBay too.

[ChuckMcM]

Nice! And yes, I did consider the ebay route for a while but I felt I didn't have a good handle on how bad "bad" syrup could be.

[andjd]

Note also that most soda fountain syrups also use saccharine instead of aspartame. This is probably so the syrup doesn't go bad as quickly. The transition to aspartame was driven by a study that showed that saccharine caused cancer in rats. That study had issues, but it had enough of an impact that consumers looked for alternatives. For soda machines, there usually isn't an ingredient list visible to the consumer, so that pressure to switch to aspartame didn't exist. There was a class-action lawsuit a few years ago claiming harm from the fountain formulation of diet sodas being different from the same brand sold at retail, but I believe it was thrown out.

[speedcoder]

Try https://sodastream.com . The soda can be sweetened with syrups they sell, or sweeten with anything you like, like Mangrove Honey which is salty and rich in itself. Add Scotch for a new drink called a "Southern Bee Sting". Squirt of lemon optional.

[Nouser76]

Honestly, I made my own using this[0] setup and I've never been happier. I had Sodastream before and the cost of refills and inconvenience of restocking them meant that I didn't actually use it that much. I bought some fruit extracts on Amazon, put a few mL in a 2L of water, and have delicious seltzer water without vendor lock-in. Now we need to refill our 10lb tank every few months, unless there's some leak/gasket problem (which has happened once or twice when the cats play near it).

You can make it more automated if you'd like with some sort of automatic agitation to dissolve the CO2, but it hasn't been too big of a bother for me to manually shake it yet.

[0] https://www.seriouseats.com/pros-cons-diy-carbonation-rig

[jweather]

We got a Sodastream for Christmas along with a SodaMod kit which comes with three food-grade tanks with paintball fill valves. That way you can fill them at a sporting goods store for $5 instead of exchanging them for $15. Related to the article, there's something very strange about the Sodastream Diet Cola that I haven't quite put my finger on. I prefer to add some lime juice to mask the flavor.

[kevstev]

How do you get the carbonation levels to an equivalent level of commercial equivalents? I have this same setup (used mostly for beer)- but when I tried to carbonate water, it was always a bit on the flat side.

[Nouser76]

Honestly, I have the opposite experience. I pressurize around 50-55PSI and do at least 2 carbonation cycles, venting in-between. Using cold water is also key, so I keep a 2L full of flat water for later carbonation - we swap between 2-3 bottles. I've recarbonated flat Dr. Pepper and it truly tasted like a fresh cracked can, carbonation and all.

We've also tried carbonating blueberries, which was really interesting. It didn't work great, but we noticed the fizziness and it'll probably be something I try again soon - perhaps using a chamber with a bigger opening than a 2L's.

[thatcat]

Your temp is too high, pressure is too low, or you didnt wait long enough.

[jo6gwb]

Grohe makes a standard sink faucet with integrated carbonation/seltzer.

https://www.grohe.us/kitchen/design-trends/chilled-sparkling...

[polishdude20]

I think a problem with releasing a powder into a carbonated drinks is it would start to foam up and bubble out possibly.

[ChuckMcM]

Depends on the powder. The "Wyler's Lemondade mix" powders do fine with the carbonated water from my Elkay machine (not that they taste as good in carbonated water but they do work). I know there were powders that added fizz to still water to make them more soda like and those would be a problem on water that was already carbonated.

[joombaga]

You can get unsweetened carbonated soda water that's "Dr." flavored. I've never tried adding a nutrasweet packet to one, but I wonder how close it would come to a "Dr." soda of the same brand.

[cosmotic]

When the old DDP expires, you buy more. If it lasted longer, you would not buy more. Though it sure causes destress on their best customers. Quite the dilemma.

[Aloha]

This was long why I preferred to purchase Tab for home diet Soda, it was largely sweetened with Saccharine, and has an virtually limitless shelf life.