DIYBIO Barcelona

An Open Wetlab

Bio Mate Soda

 

“Materva” has become a symbol of Cuban diaspora and nostalgia of pre-Castro Cuba, “Club Mate” is the preferred and signature drink of most alternative engineering cultures (a.k.a hackers), and “Nativa” became a known Coca-Cola market flop in Argentina. What unites those three drinks is the idea of carbonating the famous mate tea into energizing soda pops, or gasiosas de mate.

Inspired by these famous drinks, and of our love for Ilex paraguariensis, a.k.a yerba mate | chimarrão, we decided to brew our own homemade version of yerba mate soda. On this page we will post photos of the project and experiments, as well as news of new batches in the making.

We are experimenting with different ways of using fermentation’s CO2 for making sodas-pops, as well as working with forced carbonation. We are open to the wonders of microbiology and to trying different starter cultures for fermentation.

For general recipes of specific batches, please refer to our GitHub page.

PIF Camp, 30.07 – 06.08.2017

Experiment #1

Our PIF camp production was quite fruitful, doing all-together 22l of experiments with naturally fermented mate soda.

First, we brewed 15l of mate base, adding 600g of Cruz de Malta mate + 500g of white* sugar + a pinch of sea salt.

* White sugar is better as it is easier/faster to break down into glucose – that stuff that bacteria loves :).

As we only had 6 days for our experiments – quite a tight period for fermenting stuff – we separated the 15l into a 10l demijohn and 5l into different flip-top bottles. The 10l was going to be our main high-speed train for fermentation – we added a whole bottle of yeast from kombucha and a scoby just for giving that extra push (the yeast is often quite quick in eating the sugars).

We covered it with a cheesecloth and let it sit for 2-3 days.

 

Our fermentation “bichos”/”bugs” -> yeast from jun tea; ginger bug; water kefir; yoghurt way

The rest 5l we bottled using different fermenting cultures: yeast from jun tea, water kefir, ginger bug & whey.  Each participant labelled their experiment and we put them in a dark place.

 

Batch 10, 16.07.2017

We have been trying to make naturally fermented soda from mate. Here a couple of photos from our experiments:

Experiments with Yeast Fermentation…

Batch for Blockchain què? @ Nau Bostik

Last November we did a small batch for the Blockchain què event at the Nau Bostik. Here are pictures of our [messy] production process:

First, we had to clean and sterilize the pot where we brew the base-syrup.

 

Steeping the mate at 80 C° for about 10 minutes, checking temperature using a Arduino-based thermometer

 

Than we filtered the syrup using a siphon filter…this can get tough…
Finally, we carbonate using a long hose between 3 – 4 bars 🙂

 

Et voila…

#brew #soda #mate #biohackers #barcelona

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Useful links & materials

Recipes

  • Make your own soda: syrup recipes for all-natural pop, floats, cocktails and others by Anton Nocito (preview at Google books & available at your local gen-library 🙂 )
  • Homemade root beer, soda & pop by Stephen Cresswell
  • Homemade soda by Andrew Schloss (also available at your local gen-library 🙂 )
  • Open Mate by HackPittsburgh
  • Matedor – Open Mate syrup for SodaStream machines
  • SudoMate by SudoRoom, Oakland
  • MetaMate – hacking mate and other info on mate. A nice video from Chaos Communication Camp, here

Corny kegs & carbonation