There's just something so cool about making a delicious bottle of fizzy soda from things you grow in your own garden.

I'm completely hooked on making fizzy drinks. With just three basic ingredients: flavouring, sugar and yeast - it's really not complicated and is a nice homestead skill to have especially when you've got guests to entertain.

I've shared a few posts about my early experiments with making fizzy drinks: 'Today's Kitchen Adventure: Making Ginger Beer (Soda) & DIY Wild Yeasts' & 'Lacto-Fermented Soda Using Whey Part 1: How To Make It' but now that I've made plenty of batches I wanted to share more about it.

The big things to know

1. It's really ridiculously quick & easy to make.
2. It keeps for about a week before it loses its fizz and starts tasking less yummy.
3. The level of sweetness is up to you. Add or decrease the sugar level to taste.
4. Use plastic bottles until you've developed some steadfast recipes. Some fruits/ingredients will ferment a lot faster than others and you can end up with bottle explosions. (The rhubarb soda was fizzy hours after it was bottled and the ginger took two days.)
5. You can use use a juicer to extract the juice rather than using the pot/steam method.
6. You can use wine yeast, wild yeast, whey or even baking yeast (least recommended) to make soda.

We have become quite partial to the ginger beer soda but we don't grow ginger here so it's not sustainable. I have also been using wine yeast which again is not sustainable long term so I have also been working on wild yeasts and a ginger bug brewing to replace this. I'll share more on this in a future post. For simplicity I'll stick with the basic sparking wine yeast that you can get at any wine kit store or on-line.

Soda from the garden bounty

Yesterday I decided to make a batch with rhubarb next up will be raspberry and blackberry when the bushes finally fruit! I can't wait. Just think of all the possibilities: lemon, orange, rhubarb, blueberry, blackberry, raspberry, grape ... oh my! Goodness you could even make it with carrots or vegetables (I'll have to give that a whirl at some point).

Blackberry bush in flower

Rhubarb Ginger Soda

Ingredients

• 3 cups chopped rhubarb
• 1 large thumb of ginger root
• 8 cups of water
• 1 cup sugar
• juice of one lemon
• 1/4 tsp wine yeast

Directions

• Grate or dice your rhubarb and ginger. I used 3 cups of rhubarb and 1 big thumb sized piece of ginger.

• Add water to a large pot - I used 12 cups but you can do as much or little as you want (use purified if you have chlorinated water)

• Add some sugar to taste. I used one cup of sugar. You can use white sugar, organic cane sugar or you can add some brown sugar as well. I used organic cane sugar and when I get my hands on some local honey I'll try that as well.

• Bring to a boil and simmer for five minutes and then remove from heat. Allow to cool to room temperature with the lid on. This will sweat the juice out of the fruit. Strain the solids out. Taste the juice to make sure you are happy with the flavours.

• Add 1/4tsp sparking wine yeast (either proof your wine yeast in a small cup of warm water with sugar) or add your ginger bug or wild yeast. You can use baking yeast but I've been told this can add a hint of palatable yet yeasty flavour and have not tried it myself.

• Pour the soda into clean plastic bottles and set aside in a warm/dark corner. Burp the bottles several times per day. This means loosening the cap a tiny bit to allow the built up gas to escape. When the soda is fizzy as desired (you'll see this when you burp the bottles) and it should be fizzy like what you would expect to see when you open a store bought bottle of pop stick it in the fridge to slow down the carbonation.

Note on using juicer. You can dissolve the sugar in boiling water and then add your juice liquid if using a juicer. The boiling/steaming is only to extract the flavour from the fruit into the water.

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