Soda Jerk

About a year-and-a-half ago, my younger brother got me a "make your own root beer" kit for my birthday. The kit came with everything you needed (well, all except sugar and bowls), including the flavoring sauce. It makes some pretty good root beer, actually, but the way the kit is set up you can't really experiment with it. You just mix together all the pre-packaged ingredients and away you go. I also wish it came with some different bottles. It came with four one-liter bottles with special gas-permeable caps. It works, but the bottles are a little big for travel purposes.

Well, I was wandering around downtown Columbia, MO on my lunch break and decided to step into the store Cool Stuff, which sells a pretty random assortment of nick-nacks and tchotchkes, T-shirts, incense, that kind of thing. Not an uncommon kind of store to find in a university town. However, in the back of the store I found these large boxes with dozens of plastic bottles in them, bottles that look exactly like what came in my root beer kit, except smaller. So I looked around a bit more, and saw that the store had a lot of beer brewing kits, hops, malts, and all that kind of stuff. I started asking the staff about it, and they showed me that they had some special soda kits, as well.

So, I now own 8 half-liter (almost 17 fluid ounces) plastic bottles with gas-permeable caps, a different root beer mix, and even a cream soda mix to try out. I could have gotten an orange soda mix, but I'm not a big fan of orange soda. The cream holds promise, though, because you should be able to mix other flavors with that pretty easily. Cherry cream, orange cream, there are many possibilities. In the beginning I neglected to mention that my brother, at the same time as the root beer kit, also got me a book on making your own sodas. It might be time to really dig into that and see what other concoctions I can come up with.