You can certainly just chug down that bottle of soda you purchased, but if you accept the premise that the preparation of food and drink is just a subset of chemistry, and that chemistry is fun, then it naturally follows that using soda as the basis for brewing up some mead makes perfect sense. Thus the [Golden Hive Mead] blokes over on YouTube decided to create some Coca Cola flavored mead.
Mead is essentially just water mixed with honey that is left to ferment after adding yeast, resulting in what is also called ‘honey wine’, with an ethanol content of usually between 3.5% and 20%. Since soda is mostly water and comes with its own supply of sugar for yeast to feast on, this isn’t such a crazy choice in that respect. Just make sure to remove the carbonation, as the CO2 makes the soda too acidic for the yeast to be happy.
Instead of straight honey, caramelized honey was used for extra flavor after which the brew was left to ferment for a while. For extra flavor notes aged oak, vanilla and cinnamon were added as well, to ensure that the fermentation didn’t erase those core notes of the coke. The result was apparently rather flavorful, with about a 10.5% ethanol content, receiving the full approval of both tame test tasters.
