Soda Anyone?

So after getting the beer into bottles and into the closet for a couple weeks, I decided to have a crack at making a Dr. Pepper type soda, as mentioned earlier, that I got from Hoptech.

The scent of the extract was like a mix between Dr. Pepper and cherry, which is probably why it was called Dr. Cherry. The recipe calls for 4lbs of sugar, about 15 grams of ale yeast, water and the 4 oz bottle of extract.

This would yeild 5 gallons (roughly 2 cases) but I only had one case of beer bottles. The thing to keep in mind here, is even if I have enough bottles, you can't just leave soda out. With such a rich supply of sugar, the yeast will continue to chow, making more C02 and the bottles will burst. So I need to make sure I have enough room in the fridge for 48 bottles of soda, as I also use my fridge for storing food. So I'm halving all the ingredients.

So I need the bottling bucket, spigot, tubing, thermometer, bottling wand; all sanitized. Then I get my pre-measured ingredients. I'll be making 2 1/2 gallons, and will need a cool-down, so I stashed a one gallon bottle of spring water in the freezer before sanitizing.

I got the kitchen facuet running nice and hot and then filled a gallon and a half of water in. I put in 4 cups of sugar (2lbs) and stirred. Then I stirred in the extract. Once everything was nicely mixed, I grabbed the bottle of water out of the freezer and dumped it into the bucket (for you literalists, I opened the bottle and poured the contents into the bucket). I also dropped the thermometer in the mix.

Once we were below 80 degrees, I added the yeast and mixed thoroughly.

I got the bottles together, connected the tubing and bottling wand to the spigot, cranked it up, and started filling.

This was 5 days ago, and I still do not have carbonated soda. So I have to work out what went wrong.

I was pretty good about sanitation, so I don't think that's it. I used ale yeast instead of champagne yeast, at the recommendation of Hoptech. At first I thought it just took longer to get going. I also thought it might be dead yeast, but I am getting a little bit of firmness on my plastic bottles, so they are going, but going slow.

Yeast also have a hard time breaking down table sugar. Perhaps I never got the sugar hot enough to break it down to a monosaccharide, therefore essentially teasing the yeast and getting them very angry.

Ale yeast are also more sensitive to cold. One benefit of using ale yeast over champagne is that when you put it in the fridge it goes inactive right away. In the interest of being able to make mortgage payments without eating dry cat food, we keep the house at a consistent 68 degrees. OK for beer, not so good for soda maybe.

The latter is my best guess, although the sugar could be another reason. I have a blanket on the soda now to see if that will warm the hearts of the little yeast, and wake them up again.

To test these suspicions and for due dilligence, I plan to brew the rest of the root beer with the ale yeast and make a batch of dr cherry with the champagne yeast. I will also try brewing in the dr cherry with ale yeast in the summer months.

Oh the joys of life.....