Orange Cream Soda - Attempt #1 - Success

Last week I finally got my bio-flask for distilling essential oils. I figured what a great opportunity to test it out by getting some orange oil from the zest... But how to use the oil... Then it hit me, Orange Cream Soda!

I have attempted cream soda in the past, but none of them have been "Wow"...

This attempt was quite triumphant!

The Goal:

• Create a really good cream soda
• Turn it into a awesome orange cream soda

The plan:
Build a new scratch recipe and tweak it until it's just right. First I needed some inspiration. So I started out with the recipe posted by SodaMancy last August (http://sodamancy.blogspot.com/2011/08/recipe-homemade-cream-soda-from-scratch.html) and melded it together with the cream soda recipe found in the Homemade Root Beer, sode, and pop Book.  The resulting recipe seemed like a good starting point.

The resulting cream soda recipe:

• 8 quarts of water (4 to brew 4 to cool)
• 4 vanilla beans (chopped up into little pieces).
• 20 raisins (chopped up into little pieces).
• 1 tbs Rum 
• 1 drop of cassia oil (dropped into the rum) 
• 1/4 cup of honey
• 4 cups raw cane sugar
• 1/2 tsp Cream of Tartar

The orange experiment:

I bought a huge bag of oranges from Costco to use as the orange part of the soda. When I cut into the first orange I got a nice surprise - it was pink inside! I squeezed 4 of the oranges resulting in only about 1/2 cup of juice.  My bag of oranges did not seem so large any more. I would not have enough.  Plus my kids and wife were consuming them faster than I could squeeze them.  They ate 6 of them before I caught them stealing another.   I decided to take the 10 orange peels and put them aside to distill the oil out of them to use in the soda... only to discover that my heating element was not working so I couldn't do that either...

Back to the Cream Soda (What I did to make it):

1. Add 4 quarts of water to the brew pot and turned the heat on to high.  
2. Chop up the vanilla beans and added them to the pot. 
3. Get the raisins, chop them up and add them to the pot.
4. The water is pretty close to boiling by now...
5. Put about 1 tablespoon of rum into a small cup
6. Put 1 drop of cassia oil into the rum - This thins the oil out so that it will mix well with the rest of the wort in the pot. I decided not to use cinnamon bark because I had lots of cassia oil, and it seemed like I should start using it.
7. Add the rum/cassia(cinnamon)  tincture to the pot.
8. Add 1/4 cup of honey
9. Water is boiling... Turn down the heat to a light boil... Add 4 cups of sugar (one cup at a time - waiting for each cup to dissolve before adding the next). 
10. Let it lightly boil for 20 minutes stirring occasionally.
11. Turn of the heat.
12. Add and mix in 1/2 tsp of Cream of Tartar (This helps stop the formation of crystals - and right now this drink is very sweet). 
13. Fill up a 2 quart container with Ice cubes then add cold water to the ice to make "ice water".
14. Add the ice water to the brew pot (to cool the sweet drink)
15. Let sit for about 10 minutes, then add another 2 quarts of ice water. 
16. Taste again, - sweetness is perfect. Lost of vanilla flavor, raisins are not overpowering, and there is just a hint of cinnamon in the bouquet. (Imagine the carbonation and you are really close to a finished product)
17. I wish I had a spectrometer to get the actual sugar levels... perhaps in the future...

Now to figure out the orange part...

I took the cream soda added into several small cups (2 oz into each cup). Added the squeezed orange juice into the cups.... 

• Starting off with 2 oz into the first cup.. taste a bit... too much orange - cant taste vanilla enough (1:1 ratio)
• Add 1 oz into 2nd cup... taste a bit... still too much orange - vanilla is present but overpowered. (2:1 ratio)
• Add .5 oz into 3rd cup... taste... not enough orange (4:1 ratio)
• Add .75 oz into 4th cup... taste ... just about right a little strong on the orange side (8:3 ratio)
• Tasted from the 3rd cup again and decided to figure out what to do about my fresh squeezed orange juice shortage.
• I made some orange juice from concentrate and added .65 oz to a 5th cup.. Tasted and while not as good of an orange flavor as the fresh squeezed, this seemed to be a good ratio to use (3:1 ratio).

I had about 2 gallons of cream soda, so I made made 3 quarts or orange juice and added most of it to the cream soda. (tasting after each quart and frequently during the last to make sure the quantity was just right)

After all that, I am just shy of 3 gallons of a really good orange cream soda.

Next I poured the soda into a funnel with a filter catch the vanilla bits, raisins, and the pulp, directly into a nice clean 3 gallon keg.  Closed up the keg, Added CO2 at 30psi, shook a bunch, and into the fridge for 3 days.

The results:

After the 2nd day of carbonating, I poured myself a test glass to see how it was coming along. It was still a little light on the carbonation but wow it tasted great.  This is a keeper recipe. I'll tweak it a bit in the future but I definitely met my goal,  at least for my tastes...  Now for the real test... My friends and co-workers.