In my experimentation with soda making in the eighties, I discovered that CO2 injected water tastes really acidy. Club soda has sodium bicarbonate added to offset the flavor (and cheap ones don’t balance it very well) and then Tonic Water (with quinine) leans into the sour.
This is the reason that Coca-cola syrup has to have a crazy amount of sugar, or a high-powered artificial sweetner. The other solution is to make your fizzy water less fizzy, but when you’re a teenager who believes fizzy is God, that’s preposterous.
PS: Also don’t mix citrons (e.g. oranges or lemons) with milk, which will do terrible things as well. We have to do weird industrial / chef magic to make orange or lemon flavored ice cream and such.
They actually make carbonated water by dissolving CO2 in water. This creates a small amount of acid, not the other way around. And it really isn’t enough to taste sour- especially since the water often contains bases to offset that effect.
Wait till you get a load of that Swiss alchemist who isolated sulphur in powder form, which was later used to quickly start fires, as in matches.
Looking for gold, he thought - what else has the color of gold? The answer struck him in a moment of inspiration - urine.
This crazy bastard boiled gallons and gallons of piss in his home workspace. One can only begin to imagine the stench during those alchemical sessions… and how he was perceived by the rest of the neighborhood. Not a very popular man, I would imagine.
EDIT: Now that I think about it, I think it was phosphorus. Even more apt, considering the atomic symbol is “P”!
Ammonia from fermented urine was commonly used for washing thousands of years ago. I can’t imagine he smelled much worse than anyone else processing the stuff.
But don’t underestimate that added step of boiling it, until he was left with only a powder extract. Heat will amplify the smell and make the gases expand.
Toured a leather co-op in Morocco (Fes) where they process everything naturally. They collected pigeon droppings for similar reasons. Locals call it caca channel.
Add comment