welcome friends today in the kitchen we're gonna do something a little bit special we're going to do the 1880s Pemberton coca-cola formula and so Pemberton is the guy who invented coca-cola recipe he invented coca-cola in the hopes that he could wean himself off of morphine with cocaine in the end it didn't work for him. so so he came up with this formula and this is out of one of his notebooks and it is by no means the recipe or formula the coca-cola uses today and they're very adamant about that but by making this it should
give us a little bit of insight into where this product started and what it tasted like at the beginning and often what things taste like way back then is nothing like they do today so I started out with some high proof alcohol you want to get the highest proof that you possibly can and so what I've got is 76% 152 proof grain alcohol that's the highest that I can get where I live if you can get higher make sure it's food grade make sure that you can drink it because you can get yourself into very
solid trouble if you don't make sure it's food grade which brings us to the next thing which are these essential oils now I first wanted to do this back in 2011 what eight nine years ago I heard a broadcast This American Life on NPR and it was all about this formula and it really intrigued me and I wanted to do it and at that time everyone said to me don't bother you can't get all the ingredients and they were right I couldn't get all the ingredients and you know what I still can't get all of
the ingredients so these are food grade oils that you need to get there in this form pretty toxic you don't want to touch them you don't want to get them on you and there was one in particular that I couldn't get and that is neroli oil and tiny a little bottle of neroli oil like this this is five mils of neroli oil was four hundred and eighty dollars us to get this little bottle and the company said to me oh we can get it for you at a cheaper break if you buy four hundred pounds
it's 1.2 million like I don't think I need 400 pounds of neroli oil so the first thing we need to do is measure tiny little amounts of these essential oils and mix them into this alcohol and so I've got these tiny little syringes they're one milliliter each and we'll measure these out being very careful not to cross staminate not to get it on your hands and to get the right amounts so the oils we're working with our orange lemon nutmeg coriander neroli and cinnamon oil so the first substitution is bitter orange oil instead of Naru
Li or neroli everyone seems to say that's going to be fine so this is our 7x formula this is the 7x flavoring and we're only going to use a tiny little bit of this for a couple gallons of coca-cola very tiny little bit the next substitution that you have to make is is the coca part it is illegal to have coca leaves in North America and you need coca leaf extract there's no cocaine in coca-cola anymore they they pull that out in a factory apparently in New Jersey and then only put in the bittering compounds
from the coca leaf but since we can't have coca leaves I'm worked around a little bit and I found another extract that has sort of the same flavonoid bittering compounds and I'm gonna give that a try I think you should probably just leave it out though I'm a little worried obviously that wasn't a real coca leaf I'm a little worried that I'm not going to get it quite right so now we move on to the sugar syrup component so we're gonna start it with some water in a big pot and the next thing is to
weigh out the sugar so I know that everyone has been freaked out for years that you know perhaps way back there was cocaine and coca-cola I would posit that the real killer in this soft drink is the sugar like that's a lot of sugar so and it goes into the water and we want to just we just want to dissolve that we're making a simple syrup it's we'll just gently heat this and stir it until the sugar has dissolved while the sugar is dissolving I am going to juice some limes so the sugar is pretty
much dissolved and now we just add in caramel okay the sugar syrup is dissolved we didn't bring it up to a boil we didn't really get it hot just warm enough that the sugar crystals disappear into the water next in is vanilla I've got my notes open because I just want to make sure I get this right so in goes the vanilla and I normally don't measure vanilla I free pour but somehow this time I think it's important to to measure this is off to the point where if you were using extract of coca you
would put it in we're not putting anything in and I decided not to put anything in in its place so next in is the caffeine extract now I know it's called coca after the coca leaf and cola after the Kola nut but by 1880 1885 Pemberton already wasn't using Kola nut he was only using citrate of caffeine so directly he had decided that it wasn't the flavor that he was after it was the caffeine that he was after so he stopped using Kola nut at that point and there's no reason to believe that Coca Cola
is using Kola nut anymore so it's just straight caffeine mixture 3.75 mils and apparently this is about five times the amount of caffeine that is in Cola beverages today at the store or any beverage today at the store are really high caffeine what's that goes in the lime juice so freshly squozen lime juice and citric acid citric acid is something that is not used in today's coke you can tell that because they use phosphoric acid I think it is on the label they do list the acid that they use and that's it for the sugar
syrup okay so we've got our 7x flavor mixture and our sugar water caramel mixture and there's a bit of math involved because you only use a very little bit like 1.5 milliliters per liter of sugar syrup so I need to measure how much sugar syrup we have and then determine how much 7x to mix into it so it looks like two point two five liters so we need three milliliters of 7x let's see living dangerously there we go mix that in let's just give that a straight-up taste so this is this is really concentrated let's
just see if it's even edible huh I can see where that's going let's see what Julie thinks a little enthusiastic poor little yes on the first pour well I mean I want to make sure that the I know that the carbonation mixed with the syrup and also I've over carbonated that keg of water that's you got a kind of a brownish brown tone it smells very there's no interesting there's it over Smith yeah like there's a smell to it yeah there I get a lime I do get a lime flavor overwhelming lime flavor okay that's
the it's sweet it is sweet it's very sweet but don't you sweet for me it's a refreshing beverage I like it it's not coke I think it's too sweet oh oh no no no no but you can it would be considered a : it's a brown beverage yeah it would go well with people who like rum and coke it would do just fine Pepsi do you think it's like Pepsi I I don't think I've ever had a Pepsi I don't think I've ever had a Pepsi yeah you probably have anyway it doesn't matter um no
no but it's I can see how this evolved into coke this doesn't have the bite that Coke has there's a bitter that sort of yeah yeah what I don't know that's a lovely beverage so I would just might we make it less sweet yeah I would I would chop it some of the sugar I've definitely chopped it some of the sugar and maybe up the amount of 7x so an interesting experiment I think it's a worthwhile beverage yeah there's the funny fun right yeah I mean as much as we look very you know it is
longer it's like we were we're not yeah it is a worthwhile beverage it's I would definitely drink it I don't know that it's would stand up against beside a coke but in order to actually test this we are going to do the ultimate Pepsi challenge we're going to test this against you stated yourself I know again well I am part of the Pepsi generation I'm gonna we're gonna do this Coke and Pepsi Canadian Coke and Pepsi okay Mexican Coke and Pepsi okay Jessica just came true yeah oh okay the actual Mexican Coke versus Mexican colas
yes like the would probably find a hurry dose see if we can find the hurry toes Mexican Cola Inca Cola Inca Cola and wild card thumbs up thumbs up yeah yeah another colas type in the world and so we'll do a blind tasting of all of them the reality is all of the large manufacturers of beverages have multiple versions of their beverages that they serve sell it in multiple nations because everybody has a slightly different palate depending upon what the reading and what they're matching it with right so there's so many versions so if you
want to try the 1886 Pemberton Coca Cola recipe give it a shot I mean there's a couple there's no cocaine that's know so that might change the fact it's not good as exciting might have been long ago with that shot of cocaine I think that's pretty good I think that's pretty good and the fact that we now have two and a half liters of syrup I feel like we're gonna have to host a children's party between all the other beverages we've made recently yeah pop and chips for everybody two and a half liters yeah we're
gonna we've got a lot of this to go through it next we're stopping by see you consume
