Brewing Open Mate soda
After the members meeting last night, the M-team (Marek, Marty, Matt S., and Matt M.) brewed our first batch of Open Mate soda. Inspired by the Club Mate that Marty had ordered, but put off by its closed-source nature (hey, we are a hackerspace here!), we realized that we should brew our own. After acquiring some yerba mate tea, caffeine powder, sugar, and kegging equipment, the first batch is brewed! Check out the photos of each step, and be sure to stop by this Friday to taste the results!
Ingredients
3 gallons water
85g Chai mate tea (from Teavana)
2.5 cups ‘raw’ cane sugar
1.5g caffeine powder (handle with care!)
CO2 (to taste)
Terse instructions:
Sterilize all equipment. Bring water to just under a boil, add tea and sugar, steep for 5-7 minutes. Cool, add caffeine powder, stir well, then transfer to keg. Float 15psi of CO2 over the mixture, then release the pressure valve and re-pressurize. Repeat 5 times (to purge oxygen from the keg. Let sit for 24 hours, to allow the soda to carbonate, then drop pressure to 7psi and enjoy!
A friend of mine makes a drink called “dizzap” which is a carbonated %12 energy booze drink which contain mate along with 7 other stimulating herbs ^_^ its good
Congrats getting on the Make.com blog with this project. Sorry the Friday night session was canceled due to the snow. We’d planned on stopping by.
So, I think it’s awesome that you’re making a recipe for unusual soda. But, don’t you think you’re taking things a bit far jargonwise?
Or, alternatively, explain what the difference between “Open Source Soda” and “A Recipe We Posted On The Internet” is.
Good question! We chose the term “Open Source Soda” because we want to open up this recipe to the community. Not only do we want other folks to try this recipe themselves, we want to hear their improvements, improvisations, bottling and carbonation techniques, etc.
Just as there are open source beer recipes, open source cook books, etc., we want to open up everything about Open Mate and share the improvements with everyone who cares. We’re going to try and get better web presence and documentation going shortly, so stay tuned!
Hello, sorry for my English, I’m from south America, Argentina in fact, I wonder if the yerba mate you use, is any special type or a standard one, because, as very rarely occurs, yerba mate is very common here (any supermarket have many kinds) and is not so common in USA o Europe (as friends there told me). I’m not a big fan of the mate, but I’m really courios of this beverage, and being ocassionally a beer brewer I presumme brewing this is similar or even simpler.
Nice job M-Team! Count me among those who bristle a bit at the terminology of “open source” recipes… but I’m slowly getting over it. It seems the most justified when you’re in the process of “opening up” a previously proprietary recipe.
Anyways… I’ve never had Club Mate, but am intrigued. As a beer brewer and ginger beer creator I’m interested in any sort of fizzy beverage that’s a little odd and perhaps unpalatable to the masses. So, I just bought a case for my new hackerspace (Interlock Rochester http://www.interlockroc.org ) and I’ve got some mate and powdered caffeine on the way. I’m thinking our first batch will use some lemon juice or citric acid to add that little hint of acidic bite… I’ll keep you updated. Please let us/me know when you’ve got more documentation up!
Hey M-Team,
This looks like a really cool project. I’m a big fan of Club Mate and I’ve even tried making it myself (without much success). Two things I noticed though are that:
1) the mate tea you are using is already blended with some things that give it flavor. I might recommend using plain mate tea, such as “Guayaki Traditional Loose Yerba Mate” (available at places like Whole Foods). I figure this would get you closer to Club Mate, which is pretty plain.
2) I am not sure why you are adding caffeine powder. I’m certain that the original producers of Club Mate didn’t have to add this. Maybe by brewing it longer or with more mate, the caffeine level of Club Mate can be achieved.
Good luck with future batches !
@Ken
“I am not sure why you are adding caffeine powder. I’m certain that the original producers of Club Mate didn’t have to add this.”
The club mate bottle I have indicates “Mate soft drink with caffeine” and “Increased concentration of caffeine (20mg / 100ml)”
That’s sort of ambiguous, but my reading of it is that they have indeed added some extra caffeine to the mix, in addition to what one would get from the tea itself. Additionally, they do list caffeine as an ingredient, separate from the mate extract.
That said, I may skip the extra caffeine when I make my open mate batch… but that’s just because I like the taste more than I like the stimulating effects.
Hi Ken,
Thanks! So, we started out with the intent to clone Club Mate, but then sort of went off in a different direction- to me, it was more interesting to try some different flavors. I’ll agree that it is probably even more interesting to start with base materials (though the chai mix we used was pretty tasty). Also, we drank up our entire shipment of Club Mate, so someone has to order some more if we want to do taste comparisons.
It’s possible that they didn’t need to add caffeine, but the calculations we did using the recommended volume amount of tea showed that it needed to be supplemented. Wikipedia says that it has 20 mg caffeine per 100 ml of liquid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club-Mate), where our three grams of input tea (which was already mixed, so the actual mate content was lower) wasn’t enough to hit that amount (using http://www.erowid.org/plants/yerba_mate/yerba_mate_chemistry2.shtml for an estimation of the caffeine delivered by a hot-water extraction method). I suppose the other option is to use boiling water (needs taste test), or just more tea/volume. Also, now that we have the powder, we can use it to make other things such as caffeine jello shots
TARDY UPDATE: we finally made some Open Mate at Interlock… check out our progress here:
http://www.interlockroc.org/2010/04/17/open-mate-beta-2/
We’ve already consumed all three gallons. Onward to gallons four through six!
PS: How did yours turn out, anyways?
HEY! while doing a search for my web site (opensoda.org) I found this entry!! Sounds like you have a good start to open source soda. We have been working on open source soda for about 5 years. Take a look through my site and see our work. Let me know if you have any questions. We are not joining I3 detroit(the detroit hacker space). We are going to run some classes there. If you guys are really interested, perhaps some of you guys can come up and test some batches with us! YAY for home brew soda getting more popular!
Sooo, I’ll confess my dumbness.. Where do you get caffeine powder, of a consumable grade online? (I know I can google it, but where’d YOU get it?)
We got ours from PureBulk Nation.