I'm traveling in Japan and tried a canned soda which I loved, and would love to be able to recreate at home as it isn't available stateside. I've searched for food labs near me that could help me reverse engineer it, but I'd prefer to see how close I can get in just my kitchen.
I'd start by buying a few. Open one and let it decarbonate. It's must easier to discern flavors for uncarbonated drinks.
As an example, Coca-cola has cinnamon in it, which is almost impossible to taste when it's carbonated. It pops out when Coke goes flat.
Most sodas will have a citrus component. Japan has odd ones like Yuzu, so try to pick up some essential citrus oils that aren't normal in your home country and are plentiful there.
Then really, just put it onto stuff that you know the flavor of and taste/smell it to see if you can tell what's been added. Dip some white bread into it and see if anything comes out, etc. Don't be afraid to swirl it around in your mouth (like wine) or just breathe it in.
FYI, I was just in Japan and realized that their Sprite has a lot more lime than other countries, which I didn't really like. Normally Sprite is great in hot weather, but the lime just didn't work in the heat IMO.
Speaking of sprite, it is a rind-based drink rather than a pulp based drink. It is worth familiarising your palate With the difference between rind and pulp.
Ramune is really the Lemon/Lime Summer drink in Japan. I have always assumed Sprite was different in Japan as otherwise it is basically the same as Ramune.
First stop would be a mass spectrometry service to analyze it with an LCMS. If you can’t find one cheap enough, check your local universities for a professor or postdoc that might be willing to help - the issue is usually finding out who has the mass spec and getting some time on it.
If none of that is a possibility, try to find a certified sommelier, preferably a class where you can have a teacher and students taste test it. Their training involves learning to distinguish a bunch of aromatic compounds using an essential oil kit so they might be able to isolate some of the flavors.
If you really want to do it using just the stuff in your kitchen, you could order an aroma training kit and try it yourself. Otherwise, I’m afraid reverse engineering it yourself is really hard. There are over 2,600 flavoring food additives recognized by the EU, alone. The benefit of doing it with a trained sommelier is that they can help figure out substitutions even if they can’t identify the exact flavor.
No, a mass spec can only give you a list of molecules, like a list of ingredients but after they’ve been cooked. It can’t give you the raw ingredients or the recipe.
Most soda is sugar water with a few well known synthetic flavors added so it’s easy to identify. Secret recipes like Coca Cola are far more complex to make without easy synthetic alternatives. Any recipe that caramelizes sugar, for example, is hard to reverse engineer.
That is unlikely to work. Centrifugal separation works when the fluid you're trying to separate is a suspension of either solids or multiple fluids that do not mix (such as oil or another fat and water). Blood is a suspension of several types of several things (red and white blood cells, platelets, minor amounts of other stuff) in plasma, so you can separate each of those components out with a centrifuge. Soda, unless it contains something like fruit pulp or dairy, is generally not a suspension and therefore will not be separated by a centrifuge
Check if someone has already done the work for you. It's fairly likely you can find instructions to make a similar drink. For example, try doing a search for "Japan melon soda".
And look up the product labels in different countries because they may have to break down things in ways that other countries don’t. Hopefully the formulation is the same!
Regarding Coca-Cola and cocaine: you’re probably right about the psychoactive chemical cocaine, but Coca-Cola does actually still use a trace amount of coca leaf extract in Coca-Cola in (at least) the US.
How does this work legally? There is a (single) company that is licensed by the DEA to import coca, and they sell the non-psychoactive part to Coca-Cola. I think the psychoactive part goes toward DEA-approved research purposes, but I’m less sure about that.
Coca-Cola’s competitors do not receive or use coca through this process, only Coca-Cola.
I suspect the flavouring component is so diluted nowadays that its kept because it's a valuable sideline having that import license, and adds to the mystique a bit.
Thanks for confirming those details and being more concise than me. I had originally written “research and/or pharmaceutical uses”, but I wasn’t sure enough to warrant the extra paragraph I was going to include to explain the pharmaceutical uses. :)
I heard about this years ago, but it seems very strange what you can get away with as a massive megacorp! When I was in Peru everyone chewed Coca leaves on the backpacker scene, and many of the locals, but no one ever offered me cocaine.
Being a huge, wealthy corporation certainly helps, but I think there's a touch of tradition there, too. That the soda was already a strong cultural presence before cocaine was made illegal probably helped them get "grandfathered" in.
If it is Calpis, that is really easy to replicate, it is just yoghurt, sugar, and citric acid/lemon juice heated over a pan of boiling water. I regularly helped make a jug of this to have ready to dilute. It is as good as the store bought, and you can also make the dilution ratio to your strength. You can make it to replicate the thicker version that is occasionally sold.
As an example, Coca-cola has cinnamon in it, which is almost impossible to taste when it's carbonated. It pops out when Coke goes flat.
Most sodas will have a citrus component. Japan has odd ones like Yuzu, so try to pick up some essential citrus oils that aren't normal in your home country and are plentiful there.
Then really, just put it onto stuff that you know the flavor of and taste/smell it to see if you can tell what's been added. Dip some white bread into it and see if anything comes out, etc. Don't be afraid to swirl it around in your mouth (like wine) or just breathe it in.
FYI, I was just in Japan and realized that their Sprite has a lot more lime than other countries, which I didn't really like. Normally Sprite is great in hot weather, but the lime just didn't work in the heat IMO.