Will this succeed?

Whoa.

I think I might be on my way

to making Crystal Pepsi tonight.

Ah, Crystal Pepsi, the blast from the past

that just won't leave the public conscience.

Or at least it won't leave mine.

It was first produced for a few years in the early '90s,

which is also when I was first produced.

And it's had a few limited runs since,

most notably one in 2016.

But now, in 2020, in spite of massive public demand,

(crickets chirping)

Crystal Pepsi is nowhere to be found.

Which leaves me with no choice but to make it myself.

(dramatic music)

So the way I see it, there are two major methods

I can go about trying to make Crystal Pepsi.

And I'm gonna refer to these as the top down method

and the bottom up method.

The top down method means taking a bottle of Pepsi

and trying to remove the color from it

without removing its flavor.

And that's what I'm gonna try first.

But if that fails,

I will have to resort to the bottom up method,

which means making cola myself from scratch.

I compared the ingredients of Crystal Pepsi

and regular Pepsi, and it seems the main difference

is that Crystal Pepsi does not contain

the caramel coloring that regular Pepsi does.

So if we can get that caramel coloring out of Pepsi,

we should be left with Crystal Pepsi.

But I have no idea how to do any of that,

so I'm gonna do some research first.

(dynamic music)

So I found a couple of people that have

tried to take the color out of Pepsi.

And it seems like all of them have a relatively similar way.

They add something to the Pepsi

that separates the caramel from the rest of the cola.

What they use is...

They use milk, whole milk, and Pepsi.

Yum.

Let's go shopping.

(groovy music)

I'm gonna put my lab coat on

'cause it's time to do science.

All right, now that I'm a scientist, legally,

I don't have a PhD or a doctorate,

barely have a bachelor's degree, it's in film,

but I have the mindset of a scientist.

I've watched a few videos of people doing this

and it always looks very gross.

So I'm gonna do it.

All this involves is pouring whole milk into Pepsi.

The whole milk should combine with the caramel in the Pepsi

and it should sink to the bottom.

Then I should be able to filter out

the coagulated milk caramel mixture,

and I should be left with a clear-ish, Pepsi-like mixture.

I hope.

Oh.

Whoa.

So the milk in here should combine with

the caramel in the Pepsi,

and they both should sink to the bottom.

But that's gonna take a while.

I'm gonna leave this here overnight.

And I'm gonna try to sleep knowing that

this monstrosity is in my living room.

Oh my god, it looks like the world's worst lava lamp.

(funky music)

All right, it is day two.

So first things first,

we have our milk monster that haunted my dreams last night.

This actually worked better than I expected it to.

It is transparent at some spots.

So what I'm actually gonna do

is I'm going to filter this through a coffee filter.

It's not translucent,

but it's no longer like nearly as brown as it was.

I'm actually gonna get another cup

and I'm gonna try putting like 10 coffee filters

to see if that helps.

Kids, pay attention in science class,

'cause someday you could end up doing whatever this is.

Oh boy, this is gonna take a while, isn't it?

Maybe I'll watch something.

Ew, ew, ew, ew, ew, ew.

Here comes, oh god!

Oh, the chunks are coming.

Okay, let's add some more to this one.

Oh, I don't wanna see that.

It's okay, this one was more promising anyway.

So even after going through many filters,

this still looks disgusting, and it is certainly not clear.

But a lot of the color has been taken out of it.

The question that remains is, how does it taste?

You know what, I'm gonna taste it.

This is milk filtered Crystal Pepsi.

For science.

It just taste's like sugar water,

but with a slight hint of Pepsi,

and also a slight hint of spoiled milk.

But I think I have a better solution.

(jazzy music)

Thankfully on my shopping trip yesterday,

I had the foresight to get the ingredients that I'd need.

The main component of a cola

is what's called a 7X flavoring.

And that's a selection of essential oils.

And those include orange oil, lemon oil, cinnamon oil,

nutmeg oil, and coriander oil, as well as neroli oil.

Unfortunately I was not able to get those exact oils.

So what I'm going to be doing instead

is I'm gonna be taking the raw components

and I'm going to use a mortar and pestle

to grind them together.

And so I'm gonna start with some orange peel.

I'm gonna get about 10 grams of this.

Oh, this is gonna take me a minute, isn't it?

Four grams of cinnamon.

One gram of nutmeg.

Add some coriander seeds.

I guess that cola is really like a cinnamon citrus drink.

So I don't actually need to grind this into a fine powder,

but this should be enough.

So typically to make an essential oil,

you either use something called steam distillation,

or you can soak it in an oil for like a month.

Obviously I don't have time to do that,

but I found a trick online.

I'm going to be heating up a bit of this coconut oil,

about five tablespoons worth.

Then I'm gonna add all of the ingredients

that we ground together in the mortar and pestle,

as well as about four grams of the neroli oil.

Then I'm just gonna let this sit

over low heat for about 30 minutes.

And eventually we're gonna strain off the oil

so that we're left with a cola flavored essential oil.

So now what I'm left with is basically

a bottle of Pepsi essential oils.

But here's where I encounter an issue.

This is oil.

I have to mix this with carbonated water.

Oil and water don't play too well together.

What I need is an emulsifier,

which will coat the oil particles in a hydrophilic coating,

which means that the oil can be

dispersed throughout the water.

And therefore I can have a mixture of oil and water.

So last night I actually ordered gum arabic,

which is the emulsifier that's used in Pepsi,

for overnight shipping.

But when I went downstairs to pick up my package,

it looks like someone had stolen it.

Someone doesn't want science to happen.

And you know what, I'm gonna prove them wrong

because you know what else can be

used as an emulsifier, alcohol.

This won't make the Cola alcoholic

because A, we're gonna be cooking this a little more.

And B, there's gonna be so little alcohol in this

that it isn't even worth mentioning.

So I'm gonna take 10 milliliters of this vodka

and mix it with three tablespoons of the oil I made.

So you can see how, at the bottom of this,

the oil and the vodka are not quite mixing.

So what I need to do is to take this immersion blender

and mix these together.

(blender whirring)

So I have an emulsion now,

and that means I can start making Pepsi.

So if I were making normal cola

the next step would actually be to caramelize some sugar.

But since we don't want that caramel color,

we're going to forego that step.

And instead, move on to the next step,

which is to combine all the rest of the ingredients

to make a cola syrup.

So to make the flavoring syrup,

we're gonna need 600 grams of sugar,

three and a half grams of citric acid.

And then I just need to add in my flavoring

and 500 milliliters of water, which is about 2.1 cups.

So that's pretty much it to make the syrup.

I just have to heat this over a medium heat

for a little while, 'til it's all combined.

I'm minutes from my own homemade Crystal Pepsi,

I can feel it.

(Dakota sighs) Okay.

So I apparently didn't do a good enough job

emulsifying the essential oil with the alcohol.

So I'm gonna need to try doing that again

because this time the oil very much

just separated from the water.

(fancy music)

(blender whirring)

(Dakota laughing)

The trope of the mad scientist makes total sense.

Zero.

This is starting a bit stronger, it looks like.

Will this succeed?

Will I go insane trying to make something

that I should never have set out

to make in the first place?

Okay, so something magical has happened.

There's a few flecks of oil here and there,

but I think that most of it is properly emulsified.

I think I might be on my way

to making Crystal Pepsi tonight.

The last minutes, the moment of truth.

Let's make some seltzer.

(machine whooshing)

Two tablespoons, 12 ounces of my soda water.

It's clear, it is clear.

I've made some sort of beverage that is clear.

But that is not Pepsi.

Also the oil is separating again.

(somber music)

Oh my god.

What do I do next?

Like, look at this.

The oil and the water are clearly still separated.

And so I sit amongst the midst of my failure

telling you to not fail where I failed,

and hoping that you have more success

in your endeavors than I did in this.

Okay, so it is nearly two in the morning,

but I have just had a breakthrough.

You see this bottle?

This is full of something that tastes almost,

but not entirely, unlike Pepsi.

And it's clear.

And there's just a tiny bit of oil at the top.

So defeated, I walked over

and I sat on the couch for three hours.

But then around one I decided it was

probably time to start cleaning things up.

But I'd left the flavoring mixture sitting on the stove.

I'd just left it to cool.

When I saw it though,

all of the oil had kind of formed at the top.

So I thought to myself, why don't I just scrape this off?

And I took a little taste of the flavoring,

and it had both the flavors of the sugar,

the citric acid, and the water,

as well as the flavors of the oil.

To some degree they did combine.

So I took some of that flavoring compound,

which still clearly had a little bit of oil in it

because there is a bit of separation here,

and I added it to seltzer water.