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I wanted to try making my own soda this summer, and finally got around to it 10 days ago. Here's the thing. I didn't have/use any specialized equipment. I boiled water with sugar ~15 minutes, and combined it in 2-liter soda bottles with cool tapwater (dangerous?), flavor extracts and sucralose and let it get colder. Then added champagne yeast. Then stashed them in a dark cupboard. Today, I poured a little into a cup and it's fizzy and smells like it has a bit of alcohol, too.

But I know microbes can really mess things up and I just wanted to ask: Could the method I used be dangerous? Is there a risk of me having unintentionally grown a life-threatening bacteria, like the one that causes botulism? Thanks in advance.

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I think what you made is safe, but there's no way to not produce alcohol with that method.

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  • Safe aside from the possibility of exploding bottles from the pressure buildup.
    – Wolfger
    Commented Jul 28, 2015 at 17:02
  • Since they're PET bottles, that's a very minor concern. At least I hope that's what he means by 2L soda bottles. If he used glass, he should get rid of them as soon as possible.
    – Denny Conn
    Commented Jul 28, 2015 at 18:11
  • I used plastic ones. Thanks for the assurance Denny, I just like to get an experienced opinion when I do something new and potentially unsafe.
    – Steve
    Commented Jul 28, 2015 at 20:34
  • It's still not impossible for the plastic ones to explode if the pressure gets high enough. Store them somewhere safe.
    – Denny Conn
    Commented Jul 29, 2015 at 16:02
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This is way off topic, but is shows how much power an exploding 2 liter soda bottle can have. When in graduate school I knew some guys who made a cannon with one. They filled it partway full of liquid nitrogen (our physics lab had a lot) and put the cap on. They dropped it into a piece of pipe that was slightly larger than the bottle and was capped on one end, then dropped a length of 4x4 on top of it for ammunition. When the cannon went off the 4x4 went over the building next door and into a parking lot that they couldn't see. They were absolutely terrified that it had so much power and that they could have killed somebody with it that they never tried anything like that again.

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  • Thankfully not many people fill PET bottles with liquid nitrogen and then carry them about. PET becomes excessively brittle at temps below -100C. The thing that blew the 4x4 over the building was not an exploding bottle but a hell of a lot of nitrogen gas.
    – barking.pete
    Commented Aug 11, 2017 at 19:51

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