Comment by mattmaroon

10 hours ago

One pro-tip as I now somehow have a commercial bottling license these days: get pre-hydrated gum Arabic. Much easier to work with. Almost everybody who messes this up will make the mistake at the hydrating the gum Arabic stage. Blend it with any dry ingredients like sugar before using.

If you can’t source it, I’m not going to tell you that you SHOULD pretend to be a bottling company and ask a gum provider to send you some free samples, but you could and the amount they send you will last the rest of your life. TIC gums is pretty awesome and if you’re into frozen desserts has some incredible gum mixtures for ice creams, sorbets, etc.

Also, consider just using water soluble flavor concentrates and skipping emulsification all together. That’s what most pros do and it’s why Sprite isn’t cloudy like it would be if you used oils. My favorite suppliers that sell in consumer and pro-sumer qtys are Apex Flavors and Nature’s Flavors.

This probably won’t work for Cola as I think some of those ingredients have all of their flavor molecules in the oils, but as a general rule, if you can buy it at the store and it is clear, it is made using water soluble. If it is brown it probably isn’t, hence the caramel color additive.

11 comments

mattmaroon

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detritus  9 hours ago

Posts like this are why I read HN comments first.

Posts like this remind we how much better it is to be as part of a large trading bloc to be able to easily order/sample these sort of things, rather than it likely being a pain in the arse to get locally.

  • cogman10  4 hours ago

    IDK if it'd apply here, but there are technically laws on the books in the US against price and purchase discrimination for grocers. It was specifically one of the things Lina Khan was investigating on the way out of office and something I believe she's going to be using for the NYC grocery stores.

    A food seller isn't allowed to cut out a grocer because they are too small. However, I believe they get around this today by having minimum order sizes that make it impossible for a small grocer to handle.

    That's effectively how my small hometown grocer was driven out of business. The suppliers refused to work with them because they wanted them to order huge amounts of product that wouldn't work for my hometown with 300 people. So, the people running the store ended up just buying products from either costco or another grocery store a town over. The price hike they had to apply was simply too much for the local folk who ultimately also went to the nearby towns to save money instead of shopping locally.

atentaten  9 hours ago

Why did you get a commercial bottling license?

  • mattmaroon  7 hours ago

    Well after software I wanted a life that involved a lot less computer usage and a lot more being on my feet. So now I sell beverages via a few food trucks and also syrups people can use to make draft sodas/mocktails. We make everything ourselves because we’re all-natural everything, with the lone exception of Coke products because you just can’t get people to drink anything else.

    I basically went from no real knowledge to being able to develop commercial-scale beverages and walk them through all phases of production.

    The money’s not as good as software (but decent) and being active rather than sedentary with most of my time has done wonders for my health and mood. Man was not meant to sit in one place for long hours daily and I’m just not a gym rat no matter how many times I tried so I just reengineered my life.

    • com2kid  3 hours ago

      Seconded that I'd love to hear more.

      A couple years back I bought a "cooking from your garden" book that introduced my family to shrubs, and since then we've been making a lot of home made drinks. We mostly do different types of shrubs and tepeches. I've found that doing better than store bought isn't very hard, but I have no desire to try and scale any of my recipes.

      The other thing I used to do before I had a kid was make really fancy alcoholic snacks. Super labor intensive, but really good. For example I made a jello piña colada. I'd sweeten canned coconut cream with some white sugar on the stove, add gelatin, and some rum. let it cool a bit. Drain a can of pineapples and keep the juice, use the juice to make pineapple jello again mixed with rum, with a piece of pineapple in the middle. Join the two jellos when they are both half set. (I used silicone molds.)

      Tada! Bougie piña colada jello shots.

      With a kid now I am limiting my creativity to non-alcoholic drinks. 90% of the shrub recipes online are absurdly basic. Honestly doing "better than average" is easy because the bar is so damn low.

    • parallel  7 hours ago

      That's a really inspiring story to me. Do you have any more info about your business e.g website or blog? (I realise these are computer things and exactly what you were moving away from.)