Ingredients located at [0], full recipe at [1]. If true, it's interesting. I don't have these oils on hand but seemingly they wouldn't be too difficult to procure.
According to the This American Life episode [2] where they made a batch, the taste testers were able to detect real Coke 28 out of 30 times. So maybe it's not a perfect match! Still, it's cool.
"These days, the Coca-Cola recipe is a closely guarded secret. But it's said to no longer contain kola nut extract, relying instead on artificial imitations to achieve the flavour." [0]
This only means the flavours are derived from natural products like plants, bark, meat, milk, bone, etc. So not fully synthetic flavours (which are often from oil/gas), but still these will not be anything you would ever guess or recognise. Companies that use actual 'natural' flavours usually list them in the ingredientsas consumers take these as signals of the product being 'healthy' (e.g. fruit concentrates like apple concentrate or various citrus extracts, root extracts, leaf extracts, etc)
But "natural flavors" are the entirety of what Coca-Cola uses for flavoring, including real vanilla and cinnamon and all the rest. Whether it uses actual kola nut or not, there's no way of knowing.
Things like fruit concentrates can't be listed as natural flavors, because they're still the actual full fruit.
I remember reading that there are biotech companies that basically engineer custom flavors for products like Coke and Doritos, flavor compounds that have a powerful impact and which no one else can get. Despite the engineered nature, they qualify for labeling as “natural flavors”.
Unless you can point to a source, that sounds exactly like all sorts of urban legends I grew up with...
(The most popular one was that KFC had started using initials for its name because its chicken had similarly been so "engineered" they weren't legally allowed to call it chicken... 100% false, of course.)
I believe Senomyx was one of the companies mentioned in whatever I read (it’s been a few years). Here are some documents they filed with the SEC describing their process and some of their clients, including Coca-Cola, who hired them “for the development and discovery of specified new flavors and flavor enhancers”.
There was apparently some flak because their technology used a human embryonic stem cell line in the flavor development process.
I’m not sure the link below will mention the qualification for “natural flavor” labeling, but I recall that flavors derived from yeast fermentation - even if the yeast are genetically engineered to produce specific compounds - qualify because fermentation is a “natural” process.
Kola nut is the original caffeine ingredient in original coke. They replaced thus long ago with coffee-extracted caffeine, so there is little reason to still use kola nuts.
It's really tough seeing the amount of sugar that this recipe has. Really puts things into perspective, compared to simply drinking the end product from a can.
That's the recipe for the syrup [0], not the final beverage. The final beverage would obviously be diluted, to the given ratio of 7:1 in favor of carbonated water.
The water/sugar ratio for the OpenCola syrup is nearly 1:1, which is the same ratio as simple syrup [1].
I'm gonna poke at this only because some people take the anti-sugar message too far and use it to rationalize away the stuff that's really killing them.
Refined sugar is certainly not good for you, but a 12oz can of Coke - is 140 calories. That's about 6% of the recommended daily caloric intake.
Calories RDI is about 2000-2500 for most people. But most Americans eat more like 3000-3500 and don't exercise.
You can drink a 12 oz can of Coke every day and it's not even a blip on the radar. (A 64 oz tub of it, of course, is a different story.) What people need to do to be healthy is not overeat by 1,000 calories a day while never exercising. That combo will send you to an early grave, the can of Coke in a diet that otherwise hits the right macros, will not.
Yes, I would indeed expect that drinking around 700 fewer calories per day would lead to weight loss, because once again, despite endless protestations against the principle, calories in, calories out is the largest predictor of weight gain or loss. It's great to hear!
RDI for added sugar itself is 24-36 grams which a single 12oz can of Coke exceeds. Measuring in Calories, it's recommended to limit daily intake from added sugar to below 100-150 Calorie. [0]
% of Caloric RDI isn't the whole story. A can of Coke is less of a blip on the radar as you suggested.
Luckily for me I only drink the small 7.5oz cans... so I only ingest 6 cubes of sugar... oof. Still an improvement over my younger years. I don't have many 'addictions' in my life, but this vice has been with me for a long long time.
Acid-sugar taste-hacking is something that has bothered me for quite a while.
We know that sodium consumption can be drastically reduced by adding salt at table rather than adding it directly to food. Why doesn't this happen with sugar? Why not make desserts that take advantage of the fact that surface sugar will make it seem to be sweeter than it actually is and just have table sugar?
You can make fine powdered sugar at home with a coffee-grinder, but it will absorb moisture over time so the industrially-made variety has additives to prevent that.
I actually do this instead of buying powdered sugar. I make my own brown sugar instead of buying it as well. Both are very easy to do, so I just make it on an as-needed basis. That way, I don't have to worry about storage and the considerations that come with it.
First of all, surface salt doesn't taste nearly as good as food that is salted throughout. Every chef knows this. Not to mention that salting foods before cooking changes their texture as well. This is why a steak that is salted an hour before grilling is far more flavorful and has a better texture than one cooked without salt, but salted at the table. And it's not a subtle difference, either -- we're talking night-and-day.
And dessert basically goes the same way -- I honestly can't even imagine what something like a cherry pie would be if it were cooked without sugar, and then you were expected to dump sugar on top. But it would not be good.
That might be true, but it takes toooo much salt. So I prefer to salt after cooking, right before eating because it requires way less and gives roughly the same effect.
The reason a chef "knows this" is because if you judged their food with or without salt, the salt one would win, so in the end they're required to add waaay to much salt, when the tongue just needs those surface crystals.
Healthier to salt after, and therefore cook your own food.
It does not, and that can (and has been!) be empirically shown. Salt gets into the food and changes both chemical properties and how it responds to cooking. Pre-seasoned meats, for example, are more tender.
If you prefer to salt at the table, by all means, eat your food however you like it, but it is simply false to claim that there's no difference or "chefs just add too much salt".
It's not. Unless you have hypertension or some other medical condition around salt, there's no reason to restrict your salt intake.
For the average person, the level of salt in restaurant food has no unhealthy effects whatsoever. Amounts in excess of your daily requirement are simply excreted in urine.
I went from consuming nearly no sugar to consuming really quite a lot when I started cycling seriously. Compromise I'm at now is to do sugars for the purposes of energy for workouts, high quality calories everywhere else.
After drinking Coke for about 32 years, I switched to Coke Zero (I have cystic fibrosis and scarring of the pancreas eventually leads to diabetes). After 14 years, drinking a regular Coke tastes like I'm drinking maple syrup.
I'm aware that aspartame isn't ideal, but I'm not brave enough to give up sweet-tasting beverages yet. :-)
I had the same reaction. Makes one realize how cooking for yourself can greatly impact calorie intake. If I made my own soda instead of grabbing one from a machine I'd certainly balk at the amount of sugar I see, but the number on the side of the can tells me the same info but with less psychological impact.
When I was younger and drank more soda, I discovered I could grab a can of coke, pour it into a 24oz cup I had, then fill the can with water and pour that in and it tasted the same to me. If I focused on the flavor it was very subtly different, in a way that felt more refreshing -- but most of the time I was just drinking it without full focus and couldn't tell the difference.
Back then I was also packing lunches for my wife, and she wanted a bottle of commercial fruit juice to have with lunch. We'd buy a large bottle to save money and pour some into a smaller bottle for transport. I mentioned my experiment and she said "I'd like it if you had me try it with the juice" -- so I started doing it. A few days later she brought it up again, "Can we start diluting my juice I'm taking in?" and I told her she'd already been having diluted juice.
These days I fall into "water is the real adult beverage" but I always keep in mind just how sweet things are commonly made.
To my taste buds, North American candy, soda, and other sugary snacks have gotten twice to three times sweeter since I was a kid. To the point that in most cases, all you can actually taste is the sugar and nothing else. It would be interesting if someone were able to dig up a 30-year-old can of Coke or whatever and compare its carbohydrate content to modern Coke. (You can't just use the Nutrition Facts label, because that is not only a recent invention, but also companies free use it to lie about their products.)
We have a 1st-gen Coke freestyle machine in my workplace. On the rare occasion I go for it, I pick a zero-sugar variant, and I dilute it with 50% sparkling water otherwise every single flavor is way, WAY too sweet for me.
That's exactly what I wanted to say. Both Cola and Pepsi are too damn sweet. On the rare occasion at the right temperature and amount of thirst on my side I can drink a 330ml bottle and actually enjoy the taste. But most of the times it feels like too sugary so either I drink just a small glass and lots of water afterwards or just mix it with carbonated water directly. Bottom line: usually feels too sweet for me.
Like coffee: I like a hint of sweet in my espresso, but Cola is like dumping 4-5 spoons in a small cup of coffee. Becomes sugar syrup and that's all one can taste anymore.
I know it should be a warning sign to just not drink coke, but I've instead taken it as a "this is literally for filling a glass already prefilled to the brim with ice like in the ads" kind of thing.
Because undiluted coca cola is just honestly not very good, and extremely uh, I'm not sure how to put it, practically pungent
> have gotten twice to three times sweeter since I was a kid.
They definitely have not. You just like sugary things better as a kid.
It's kind of like, the summer camp I went to as a kid, and recently revisited as an adult -- they shrunk all the buildings and fields in size by half! Or so it certainly seemed, I could have sworn...
I can't eat the candy I ate as a kid either. Now, 85% dark chocolate on the other hand...
This is true, but the thing is, you don't have to follow the recipe. When I made a batch of this, I just bought the 7x concentrate from Cuba-Cola (https://cube-cola.org/index.php?route=product/category&path=...) and then added like half the amount of sugar it called for when making the concentrate, so that it was more like a 1:1 sugar:water ratio ("simple syrup") rather than a 2:1 ("rich syrup"). It didn't taste as sweet as commercial Coke, but it tasted fine.
I stopped drinking soda many years ago because it's all just far, far too sweet for me. But a couple of years back, I started making my own (real) root beer because making my own means that I can control how sweet it is. I prefer mine with about 1/3 the sugar that is in most soda.
People repeatedly say online that we know the Coca-Cola recipe, it's been leaked, etc., so it's not a secret, but it's clear doing some casual afternoon reading that whatever the exact composition is, it's not public knowledge.
All of the recreations that you can find readily available online and through videos "come close" or are "their own thing, but pretty decent," etc. At best, what we think we know of Coca-Cola is some long historic recipe that hasn't been used for decades.
Actually, it's the Stepan Corp. in New Jersey that holds the importation license. After ridding the coca leaves of methyl benzoyl ecgonine, they supply Coca-Cola with the denatured product for use in formulating the beverage.
I bought from Cuba Cola in the past. It wasn't bad. It basically tasted like grocery-store-brand Coke. I kept the 750ml syrup concentrate in the fridge at would add an ounce or so to my water carbonator whenever I felt like having a cup of soda.
It was intended to ween me off Coke, but, I'm sad to say that Coke won. I didn't bother purchasing another batch when we finished the first one. I instead graduated to buying the mini cans of Coke rather than the full-sized ones.
I know nothing about the Cola recipe, but this fork seems to change some things up [1]. README says it is from "This American Life" [2] but it looks like it is closer to that of colawp.com [3].
'TAL' calls for FE Coca, Alcohol, and Vanilla but 'colawp' does not.
Not really, since you're gonna boil it until it dissolves. But I'm assuming the recipe says granulated sugar instead of, say, confectioner's sugar, because the latter often adds corn starch or potato starch to the sugar as an anti-caking agent, so you might not be getting the correct amount of actual sugar in the solution.
OpenCola always gets passed around but for me it just represents the tip of a very frustrating iceberg.
There are tons of flavor formulations I'd love to know - not because I'm a chemist or a food scientist but just out of sheer curiosity and the desire to learn how stuff is made.
“Artificial flavor” and “natural flavor” is an exemption on labelling I’d like to see disappear.
Once I bought “cinnamon spread” and it didn’t have cinnamon in the ingredients. The company refused to tell me if “natural flavors” included cinnamon. (I’m sure it did because cinnamon is cheap, but c’mon).
And yeah, a lot of alcohol products get exempted from ingredient labelling for some reason. Should be treated like food is.
AFAIK real cinnamon isn't included in the umbrealla of "natural flavors" which are isolated compounds. If it contained real cinnamon it would list cinammon, or at least "spices"
I once worked on a project for a company that made food flavoring products. I helped build their digital cookbook.
They had different recipes for the same flavor depending on the usage. For example, ranch chip powder and ranch dip would have different ingredients and cooking instructions.
Also that had so many different ways just to make vanilla flavoring depending on the customer's needs. So two soda makers might use different artificial vanilla flavorings.
Personally I'd like to know the formulas for certain foods because lately there have been a lot of ingredient and process changes that have made the foods and drinks taste so much worse, and not just in processed foods. There's the overreliance on high fructose corn syrup, the switch from canola to much worse and more environmentally destructive palm oil, the rise of using acid concentrates instead of actual fruit juice, and so on. If it's not the ingredient changes, it's market consolidation that has killed the better product so the bigger one can survive, such as Cheez-Its killing Cheese Nips. If I knew the old recipes I'd make these things myself.
Preface, flavoring and perfumery are very nearly the same practice. You can view the back catalog of the trade rag Perfumer and Flavorist, which will include formulae and articles of ingredients or industry developments. Of course there are books on the topic. The Good Scent Company is a free online database of aromachemicals. Further, you can buy these ingredients from places like Perfumer's Apprentice, if you wanted to get to know some of them.
For natural ingredients, you can usually just google the name of it plus "gcms" and get a list of known compounds in it with percentages.
Not an easy profession or hobby to get into, though.
Unless you have access to coca leaves, your recipe is likely to taste like generic cola.
Coca-Cola has special privileges to import raw coca leaves. They extract the cocaine (which is then sold for pharmaceutical use). The mostly-cocaine free extract is then used to flavor their cola. AFAIK Coca-Cola is the only entity in the US allowed to do this, so it is unsurprising that other cola brands taste significantly different.
It's hard to find the right information, but there is very limited manufacturing of the pure flavor concentrate which is then exported to bottling factories around the world, the bottling factories add water, sweetener, and carbonation and are generally owned separately.
I can't stand canned US coke. I have to drink mexican coke, which is sold at Homedepot near me. They seem to be selling those at $1 per bottle pretty well.
Cane Sugar vs high-fructose corn syrup, yes. That's the conventional wisdom.
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt did a study where he concluded that people who think they like Mexican Coke more than Regular Coke simply enjoy tasting Coke out of a glass, and the perceived cane-sugar vs HFCS may just be a placebo:
If you had the energy to do so, you could try to replicate his results, i.e. buy a Mexican Coke, an American Glass Coke, and an American Can Coke, and decant them all into glasses or cups at home, then see if you can taste the difference.
If all your brain/tongue perceives as horrible is the taste of the aluminum can, you could always switch to buying Coke in glass bottles, which are more expensive than cans but still cheaper to buy in bulk than Mexican Cokes, and can be found at most grocery stores.
Or, if being limited to Mexican Coke means it reduces your overall soda consumption because you're only able to drink it when you're near a Home Depot, keep doing what you're doing. You'll probably be healthier for it.
You're assuming that the taste is only affected by what it's being served in, not how the liquid was transported. For all we know, aluminum imparts some sort of off-flavor into the Coke itself that the OP doesn't like, in which case it wouldn't matter if he decants it into a glass first--it would already have been "tainted" by being held in the aluminum can.
It may again be placebo effect, but I can still taste the difference in bottled water poured into my steel water bottle and my usual filtered tap water.
I also can't stand plastic bottled sodas, and can tell they've been sitting in one even if drank out of something else after opening.
I fear the bottling/canning process and length of time spent in it gives it a bit of a whiskey-barrel style finishing taste alteration.
I learned/realized recently it's only because of the US's deeply entrentched subsidies on corn that allows for HFCS to be cheaper than sugar and why it's so heavily used in processed foods.
Same with ethanol gas. If not for the corn subsidies, it wouldn't be cheaper. Also much more gas is burned growing/harvesting the corn and electrical powering the process than is saved in emissions (there was a great piece on HN of this some time ago), so it's a net negative to the environment. It's so dumb it hurts, but Iowa is an early presidential election state, so good luck finding someone who will go in and tell those early voters that they're gonna slow the gravy train...
The actual reason we stay on ethanol as a fuel additive is not about saving the planet: It's simply a good octane booster for the kinds of reliable octane you need in modern engines. Before, we had leaded gas which is bad, then MTBE which kept poisoning water tables.
In contrast, using 15% ethanol uses 15% less gas at a time when we were desperately trying to not be held by the balls by the middle east gas sellers, it's trivial to produce at scale, it was a simple handout to corn growers, which the US cares deeply about, and refineries didn't mind that it reduced the energy density of fuel by a couple percent, requiring you buy more gas for the same amount of energy, and it would never end up with a 60 minutes special about how it has been poisoning all of us for decades. We should have been using it the whole damn time.
Having done triangle tests with Mexican Coke and HFCS Coke, I find it unbelievable someone "can't stand" one and enjoys the other.
Mexican Coke doesn't use cane sugar anymore. But when it did, I'd read that the sucrose in peak-era Mexican Coke broke down into a HFCS-similar mix of fructose and glucose in the drink's acidity anyway.
I'm convinced the Mexican Coke thing is just some hipster thing, and Coca-Cola is glad to exploit it.
Having also done blind taste tests, I can pretty reliably pick out the mexican coke, but I agree that it's unlikely that someone would love one but not the other in a cup.
I think the real differentiator is drinking out of a glass bottle vs. a can.
I could still taste the difference after decanting to a cup. I felt like it was still mostly can/bottle, but didn't have an American bottle to use as a control.
There definitely is a subtle difference. I was about to pick out the different drink reliably. It's just hard to imagine the difference is make-or-break between enjoying and intolerable for anyone. And it less likely comes from the sweetener and more from the Mexican water versus the water at your local Coca-Cola bottler.
West coast Coke vs East coast Coke would be an interesting test I've never thought about doing.
I can reliably pick out the difference between bottle, canned, and fountain Coke and Pepsi (all 6 variations). Out of the fountain, Coke and Pepsi are sweeter than their packaged counterparts (because the syrup is usually fresher and more concentrated); Pepsi tastes somewhat like a blend of Coke and watered-down Dr Pepper. Canned Coke and Pepsi have a metallic taste not found in its bottled or fountain counterparts (and this taste remains even if poured into a cup).
For bottled Coke, HCFS Coke and Mexican/Kosher Coke taste similar but not the same: HCFS Coke has stronger/bolder (one-note type of) sweetness but sugar Coke has a broader sweetness.
All versions of regular Pepsi have a cloying aftertaste.
I was hoping to find the original recipe with coca leaves. I've just spent almost three months in Columbia and Peru, where coca tea is everywhere — it's much gentler and better alternative to coffee. I really wish it was exported to the rest of the world.
I still have an unopened can of the commercially-brewed OpenCola personally given to me by Cory Doctorow about twenty years ago! (Plus two opened cans, which I saved after I drank the contents.)
Coke's success isn't due to their formula, it's due to their brand. You could release a perfect Coca-Cola clone and you'd probably struggle to sell it.
There is a conspiracy theory that 1987s introduction of new coke (in which all old coke was pulled from the market) was actually to cover up the taste difference when they switched from using sugar to high fructose corn syrup.
When old coke came back people didn't notice the change as much.
You can still get Coke made with sugar (Mexico) give it a try and make up your own mind.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadAccording to the This American Life episode [2] where they made a batch, the taste testers were able to detect real Coke 28 out of 30 times. So maybe it's not a perfect match! Still, it's cool.
0: https://github.com/cognitom/OpenCola/blob/master/recipe.mark...
1: https://cube-cola.org/index.php?route=information/informatio...
2: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/427/original-recipe
[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160922-the-nut-that-hel...
INGREDIENTS: CARBONATED WATER, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, CARAMEL COLOR, PHOSPHORIC ACID, NATURAL FLAVORS, CAFFEINE.
https://us.coca-cola.com/products/coca-cola/original
Things like fruit concentrates can't be listed as natural flavors, because they're still the actual full fruit.
(The most popular one was that KFC had started using initials for its name because its chicken had similarly been so "engineered" they weren't legally allowed to call it chicken... 100% false, of course.)
There was apparently some flak because their technology used a human embryonic stem cell line in the flavor development process.
I’m not sure the link below will mention the qualification for “natural flavor” labeling, but I recall that flavors derived from yeast fermentation - even if the yeast are genetically engineered to produce specific compounds - qualify because fermentation is a “natural” process.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/vprr/0806/08061155.pdf
The water/sugar ratio for the OpenCola syrup is nearly 1:1, which is the same ratio as simple syrup [1].
0: https://github.com/cognitom/OpenCola/blob/master/recipe.mark...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrup#Inverted_sugar_syrup
No matter how bad you think artificial zero calorie sweeteners are, they are nothing compared to the damage that too much sugar does to your body.
Refined sugar is certainly not good for you, but a 12oz can of Coke - is 140 calories. That's about 6% of the recommended daily caloric intake.
Calories RDI is about 2000-2500 for most people. But most Americans eat more like 3000-3500 and don't exercise.
You can drink a 12 oz can of Coke every day and it's not even a blip on the radar. (A 64 oz tub of it, of course, is a different story.) What people need to do to be healthy is not overeat by 1,000 calories a day while never exercising. That combo will send you to an early grave, the can of Coke in a diet that otherwise hits the right macros, will not.
When I drink Coke, it becomes the primary way I hydrate. So five, six cans a day is not uncommon.
I can't speak for everyone, but I've known plenty of other people who end each workday with 5+ cans of Coke on their desk.
Personally, when I was drinking coke regularly, I was >30% body fat. Now that I've cut Coke completely from my diet, I am ~15%.
Honestly though, I would love for these facts to not be true for me. I miss Coke dearly. It's my favorite drink.
Only that blood sugar levels also affect hunger, psyche etc.
So no, you cannot just sum up calories in that case.
% of Caloric RDI isn't the whole story. A can of Coke is less of a blip on the radar as you suggested.
[0] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/carbohydrates/a...
I'm surprised this is not common knowledge, but I guess people in general don't read labels.
https://www.zmescience.com/other/sugar-26072011/
We know that sodium consumption can be drastically reduced by adding salt at table rather than adding it directly to food. Why doesn't this happen with sugar? Why not make desserts that take advantage of the fact that surface sugar will make it seem to be sweeter than it actually is and just have table sugar?
1) Care about their customers' health, which they have no reason to
2) Be willing to risk brand damage by exposing how much sugar is in their garbage
3) Be willing to "burden" users with the task of adding sugar which isn't "convenient"
It's far easier to just feed people garbage while you're making $$$
Some people like rituals with their addiction.
Seeing the sugar being added may create the perception of more sweetness than there is. (But also guilt, so it can go both ways).
And dessert basically goes the same way -- I honestly can't even imagine what something like a cherry pie would be if it were cooked without sugar, and then you were expected to dump sugar on top. But it would not be good.
The reason a chef "knows this" is because if you judged their food with or without salt, the salt one would win, so in the end they're required to add waaay to much salt, when the tongue just needs those surface crystals.
Healthier to salt after, and therefore cook your own food.
It does not, and that can (and has been!) be empirically shown. Salt gets into the food and changes both chemical properties and how it responds to cooking. Pre-seasoned meats, for example, are more tender.
If you prefer to salt at the table, by all means, eat your food however you like it, but it is simply false to claim that there's no difference or "chefs just add too much salt".
It's not. Unless you have hypertension or some other medical condition around salt, there's no reason to restrict your salt intake.
For the average person, the level of salt in restaurant food has no unhealthy effects whatsoever. Amounts in excess of your daily requirement are simply excreted in urine.
Many athletes especially in very hot climates need high sodium, sometimes up to 8 grams a day.
I'm aware that aspartame isn't ideal, but I'm not brave enough to give up sweet-tasting beverages yet. :-)
Back then I was also packing lunches for my wife, and she wanted a bottle of commercial fruit juice to have with lunch. We'd buy a large bottle to save money and pour some into a smaller bottle for transport. I mentioned my experiment and she said "I'd like it if you had me try it with the juice" -- so I started doing it. A few days later she brought it up again, "Can we start diluting my juice I'm taking in?" and I told her she'd already been having diluted juice.
These days I fall into "water is the real adult beverage" but I always keep in mind just how sweet things are commonly made.
We have a 1st-gen Coke freestyle machine in my workplace. On the rare occasion I go for it, I pick a zero-sugar variant, and I dilute it with 50% sparkling water otherwise every single flavor is way, WAY too sweet for me.
Like coffee: I like a hint of sweet in my espresso, but Cola is like dumping 4-5 spoons in a small cup of coffee. Becomes sugar syrup and that's all one can taste anymore.
Because undiluted coca cola is just honestly not very good, and extremely uh, I'm not sure how to put it, practically pungent
They definitely have not. You just like sugary things better as a kid.
It's kind of like, the summer camp I went to as a kid, and recently revisited as an adult -- they shrunk all the buildings and fields in size by half! Or so it certainly seemed, I could have sworn...
I can't eat the candy I ate as a kid either. Now, 85% dark chocolate on the other hand...
All of the recreations that you can find readily available online and through videos "come close" or are "their own thing, but pretty decent," etc. At best, what we think we know of Coca-Cola is some long historic recipe that hasn't been used for decades.
It was intended to ween me off Coke, but, I'm sad to say that Coke won. I didn't bother purchasing another batch when we finished the first one. I instead graduated to buying the mini cans of Coke rather than the full-sized ones.
You're a better person than I—I find those mini cans frustratingly unsatisfying.
'TAL' calls for FE Coca, Alcohol, and Vanilla but 'colawp' does not.
1: https://github.com/mmichelli/Coca-Cola/compare/master...cogn...
2: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/extras/the-recipe
3: https://www.colawp.com/colas/400/cola467_recipe.html
There are tons of flavor formulations I'd love to know - not because I'm a chemist or a food scientist but just out of sheer curiosity and the desire to learn how stuff is made.
I wish people would research other flavors, e.g.:
* Bubblegum
* Tutti Fruitti
* Irn-Bru
https://youtu.be/sR8M4zARBXY?si=CFFmCb26yBY1YUlB
Once I bought “cinnamon spread” and it didn’t have cinnamon in the ingredients. The company refused to tell me if “natural flavors” included cinnamon. (I’m sure it did because cinnamon is cheap, but c’mon).
And yeah, a lot of alcohol products get exempted from ingredient labelling for some reason. Should be treated like food is.
https://www.amazon.ca/Imperial-Cinnamon-Spread-250g/dp/B00FO...
Buddy they're substituting lead for cinnamon in applesauce to save a penny or two. Cheap doesn't matter at scale if you can find a way to go cheaper.
They had different recipes for the same flavor depending on the usage. For example, ranch chip powder and ranch dip would have different ingredients and cooking instructions.
Also that had so many different ways just to make vanilla flavoring depending on the customer's needs. So two soda makers might use different artificial vanilla flavorings.
I miss Dr Pepper too, with aspartame or that other chemic it's just not the same.
I wonder why that's not the case.
For natural ingredients, you can usually just google the name of it plus "gcms" and get a list of known compounds in it with percentages.
Not an easy profession or hobby to get into, though.
Coca-Cola has special privileges to import raw coca leaves. They extract the cocaine (which is then sold for pharmaceutical use). The mostly-cocaine free extract is then used to flavor their cola. AFAIK Coca-Cola is the only entity in the US allowed to do this, so it is unsurprising that other cola brands taste significantly different.
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt did a study where he concluded that people who think they like Mexican Coke more than Regular Coke simply enjoy tasting Coke out of a glass, and the perceived cane-sugar vs HFCS may just be a placebo:
https://www.seriouseats.com/coke-vs-mexican-coke
But YMMV. Even having read that study, I still prefer Mexican Coke.
Even if a placebo, it's still true - I can't stand canned coke. I can't drink it, the taste to me is horrible.
If all your brain/tongue perceives as horrible is the taste of the aluminum can, you could always switch to buying Coke in glass bottles, which are more expensive than cans but still cheaper to buy in bulk than Mexican Cokes, and can be found at most grocery stores.
Or, if being limited to Mexican Coke means it reduces your overall soda consumption because you're only able to drink it when you're near a Home Depot, keep doing what you're doing. You'll probably be healthier for it.
Or just pour it in a glass?
You're assuming that the taste is only affected by what it's being served in, not how the liquid was transported. For all we know, aluminum imparts some sort of off-flavor into the Coke itself that the OP doesn't like, in which case it wouldn't matter if he decants it into a glass first--it would already have been "tainted" by being held in the aluminum can.
I also can't stand plastic bottled sodas, and can tell they've been sitting in one even if drank out of something else after opening.
I fear the bottling/canning process and length of time spent in it gives it a bit of a whiskey-barrel style finishing taste alteration.
And twice as much caffeine per ml.
In contrast, using 15% ethanol uses 15% less gas at a time when we were desperately trying to not be held by the balls by the middle east gas sellers, it's trivial to produce at scale, it was a simple handout to corn growers, which the US cares deeply about, and refineries didn't mind that it reduced the energy density of fuel by a couple percent, requiring you buy more gas for the same amount of energy, and it would never end up with a 60 minutes special about how it has been poisoning all of us for decades. We should have been using it the whole damn time.
Mexican Coke doesn't use cane sugar anymore. But when it did, I'd read that the sucrose in peak-era Mexican Coke broke down into a HFCS-similar mix of fructose and glucose in the drink's acidity anyway.
I'm convinced the Mexican Coke thing is just some hipster thing, and Coca-Cola is glad to exploit it.
I think the real differentiator is drinking out of a glass bottle vs. a can.
There definitely is a subtle difference. I was about to pick out the different drink reliably. It's just hard to imagine the difference is make-or-break between enjoying and intolerable for anyone. And it less likely comes from the sweetener and more from the Mexican water versus the water at your local Coca-Cola bottler.
West coast Coke vs East coast Coke would be an interesting test I've never thought about doing.
For bottled Coke, HCFS Coke and Mexican/Kosher Coke taste similar but not the same: HCFS Coke has stronger/bolder (one-note type of) sweetness but sugar Coke has a broader sweetness.
All versions of regular Pepsi have a cloying aftertaste.
Open Cola - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12546439 - Sept 2016 (66 comments)
OpenCola Soft Drink - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5809564 - June 2013 (35 comments)
Open Source Cola - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2057321 - Jan 2011 (14 comments)
But they don't want to make Coca-Cola, they want to make Pepsi.
There is a conspiracy theory that 1987s introduction of new coke (in which all old coke was pulled from the market) was actually to cover up the taste difference when they switched from using sugar to high fructose corn syrup. When old coke came back people didn't notice the change as much.
You can still get Coke made with sugar (Mexico) give it a try and make up your own mind.