While soda is very cheap at the store, it is also not very good for you. What most people don’t know is that making your own soda pop is actually quite simple. If you have the time, you’ll only need a few ingredients to get started. Let’s take a look at how you can get started experimenting with your own homemade sodas!

The first thing you need to consider is how you will carbonate your drink. If you’re going to get serious about creating your own sodas, you’re going to need a professional grade carbonation machine. If you’re just trying it out, you have easier methods of carbonating your drinks. The easiest way to carbonate your drink is to mix your syrup or fruit juice with seltzer. If you’re making a fruit juice soda, all you need is to mix a 1:1 ratio of fruit juice as seltzer. If you’re using an organic soda syrup, you may need to use more seltzer. You can experiment with how much seltzer you use to adjust how fizzy you like your drink.

Another method to carbonate your drinks is to use dry ice. But please be careful! Dry ice is extremely dangerous. Not only can it burn you but it can cause a closed container to explode. The dry ice method of carbonating your drink is fairly straight forward. Get your fruit juice or organic soda syrup into a container that you can seal. Then you’ll want to add a small amount of dry ice and let it sit in the soda for a while and bubble. Then you’ll want to cap the container and start shaking the mixture. If you don’t shake the mixture, the container will explode! After shaking vigorously for a minute or two, unscrew the cap slowly, letting the pressure out. Once you can open it all the way, you’re ready to pour the drink into a glass of ice for a refreshing drink.

As you practice more, you can get more fancy with your flavoring and try something like organic root beer extract. Buying the extract is a lot simpler than trying to ferment your own root beer. It takes a lot of time and your drinks will be slightly alcoholic if you make root beer from scratch.

So take your time and be sure to keep safety as your number one priority, especially if you’re using dry ice for carbonation.