In this day and age of endless chemical laden sodas, one begins to dream of a simpler time. A time when soda was made with real sugar. A time when flavors of soda actually tasted like something nature made. I remember my parents had purchased a home soda maker from Schwan's when I was a child. I loved the idea of making my own soda. Even today, I collect recipes for all natural homebrewed sodas but brewing my own is intimidating. I could make it, it's not that hard but I always feel like I need someone to hold my hand through the process.
Enter Andy Schloss and his new book Homemade Sodas. The book starts out with clear instructions for making and brewing your own sodas. He talks about the history of soda and how ingredients have changed. The pictures call to the reader to remember the better times. Times when drinking coke was a treat not a necessity.
Andy Schloss then moves into the drinks, slowly, starting with sparkling waters. Easy to create mixes that combine with sparkling water to make a refreshing spa-like drink. He moves onto fruit based drinks some mixed with seltzer, others carbonated with a soda siphon and eventually to brewing.
What I loved about this book is he gives you all three options most of the time. You can make the soda with seltzer, through a soda siphon or brew it. For me, that gives me the chance to work my way up to brewing. If we like the flavor with the seltzer then we know we'll like the brewed variety. And it gives me the chance to chicken out if I still can't talk myself into homebrewing.
Some of the soda concoctions sound highbrow - like honey cardamon or fizzy honeydew. They can be off putting for your average soda drinker but those with a sense of adventure can only see the beginning of possibilities.
Don't worry Andy Schloss has offered a few "normal" recipes from Orange Crush to Cola to Very Cherry Cola to several types of root beer.
This book has recipes for everyone from the soda drinker to the organic concoction drinker. I will definitely be making some cola extract and see if I can wean my boys off the canned stuff and to the homemade varieties. Now all I need is a recipe for Mellow Yellow and we just may give up store-bought soda all together. ( )

This one's definitely on my to-buy list, as a print book. Perfect for summer especially; make your beverage after hitting the farmers market for the freshest fruit or other ingredients. From the colorful, slightly retro fun illustrations and photos to the wildly varied recipes, it's very enticing. The book begins with the highlights of the history of carbonation and soda and the history bits mixed in are pretty interesting. Then it covers three kinds of soda making: 1.) make your syrup with your fruits, herbs, honey or sugar etc., and simply combine the syrup with a bottle of store-bought seltzer water; 2.) do the same but use a carbonation charger such as Sodastream; 3.) or ferment your own beverage (the most complicated).

Recipe types that really caught my interest were the sparkling waters (lightly flavored), fruit sodas, herbal sodas, sparkling coffees and chocolate, and vinegar/fruit drinks like shrubs and switchels. These are the kind of specfic recipes that totally intrigued me: sparkling rose water, chocolate mint sparkling water, blueberry cinnamon soda, orange crush soda with actual oranges, coffee chocolate stout bee (nonalcoholic), orange rosemary crush herbal soda, vanilla pear shrub, etc etc! It covers more typical sodas too, like cola, root beer, cream soda, kombucha, etc., and at the end, recipes for cooking with soda, including desserts.
I received the ebook courtesy of the publisher (Storey) and Netgalley. ( )