Removing soft drinks from your diet is a quick way to improve your health and lose weight – that much we all probably already know and agree on. But it’s not always easy to do. As humans, we crave that pleasant tingling, cooling sensation with every sip of fizzy drinks. The key may be in finding another drink that gives us the same sensation we enjoy and these fermented drinks may prove helpful.

If you were ever curious about making fermented drinks, you would have encountered the word ‘bug,’ which is a Western colloquial word for microbes. At Starter Sisters, we’ve shared how to make a pandan-ginger bug and the turmeric bug. Once you have an active starter, you can brew any of these fizzy drinks anywhere from 2 to 3 days, depending on the weather. Here are the five fizzy drinks to try:

1. Fizzy Pandan Soda (recipe)

If you’re a fan of fizzy probiotic drinks like flavored kombucha and water kefir, do give this drink a try. You can make a big batch— just double, triple or quadruple the recipe, specially if you’re throwing a party. Make your starter from scratch using this pandan-ginger bug here.

2. Sweet Potato Tops Soda (recipe)

In this recipe, we also use our pandan ginger starter to make fermented soda out of a childhood favorite, the refreshing talbos ng kamote tea. We used to enjoy adding calamansi juice and watching it turn pink from the acid in the citrus. In this recipe, the lactic acid bacteria builds in the kamote tops soda during its fermentation and the tea eventually turns pink! 

3. KomBuko (recipe)

The name started as a joke but it just stuck. With our pandan bug starter, we thought of creating a fizzy fermented drink with its go-to food pairing, buko (young coconut). Yes, it is inspired by the famous buko pandan. While the original recipe uses balicucha, you can use any sweetener you like.

4. Tanglad Turmeric Cooler (recipe)

This drink features the turmeric bug you can make from scratch and is paired with lemongrass tea. Known as tanglad here in the Philippines, lemongrass is a woodsy aromatic grass popular in Southeast Asian cuisine and fairly easy to find. 

5. Tepache (recipe)

A Mexican fermented drink made from pineapple peels, tepache de piña is super easy to make. Because you’ll be using the peel, it’s important to use organic pineapples. Traditionally, you use pilocillo, the unrefined cane sugar typically used in Latin America. But, you can also just use brown sugar.

Remember that making homemade soda needs two fermentation stages: first for the starter, and second for the soda itself. This means that brewing can take anywhere between 6 to 12 days, from start to finish, depending on the weather. So to be efficient, we recommend making a big batch of your preferred starter and that you just put this in the fridge to hibernate. Read more about this process and how to wake up a bug here.

We have more recipes using ferments for you to try in our recipe archives. Not sure where to start? These are the 5 Most Popular Recipes Using Ferments on our site. Interested to try your hands on ferments? Here are the Top 5 Ferments To Try This Year.

If you find the free content we’re sharing useful in your fermentation journey, we would welcome some coffee!

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