Making a homemade soda might, at first, seem daunting for a homebrewer more used to hops and barley than sugar and vanilla.

This is because we tend to think of soda as a more artificial and industrial product, when in fact soda’s history goes back to homebrewers in Colonial America making their own concoctions flavoured with roots, ginger and spruce tips; colonials would brew up these ‘beers’ in their spare time, using yeast and a little sugar for carbonation to make a lower alcohol alternative to beer and whisky. This recipe was inspired by those old homebrew sodas.

Fallout is a video game series set in a post-apocalyptic USA, following a devastating nuclear war with China in the year 2077. First launched as a point-and-click strategy title in 1997, it’s since become an amazingly popular franchise, in which Nuka Cola has made regular appearances since the original game.

Fans go crazy for Nuka Cola. It’s been merchandised to death with cups, t-shirts, caps, lunch boxes and even a real-world prop version was given out at the video games conference E3 in 2008. Part of its popularity is that Fallout has always put a lot of effort into its entertaining brand of visual storytelling.

The United States of Fallout before the apocalypse was very different from our own. Culturally it never moved on from the 1950s; old battered jukeboxes still belt out Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, and the pre-war shops are full of mannequins dressed in sweater vests, checked shirts and slacks. Despite this century-long cultural paralysis, the technology of Fallout’s 2077 is futuristic compared to our own in 2022.

It’s a beautifully conveyed world of retro-futurism, with clunking robot ‘Protectrons’ ripped straight out of Forbidden Planet, cumbrous laser pistols and blocky computer consoles with glowing green text command interfaces. There’s also an eerie ease towards, and acceptance of nuclear weapons. Every home owns a copy of the Blast Radius board game, nuclear-powered cars are found on every street, and Elton Britt’s 1955 weirdly cheery tune Uranium Fever is considered a total banger.

““In the Fallout games, the drink is explicitly hazardous for your health.””

All of these themes are present in the series’ food items too. The 1950s diet of high sugar and fat convenience food can still be seen with the remaining foodstuffs littering the wastelands corner stores and supermarkets including such mouth-watering delights as Instamash, Salisbury Steak and Imitation Seafood. The cultural embrace of nuclear weapons is evident in foods such as BlamCo Mac and Cheese, Sugar Bombs and of course Nuka Cola.

Nuka Cola is, of course, also a not-so-subtle, jab at a certain multinational cola brand. In the games, the drink is explicitly hazardous for your health: it’s highly addictive and while playing the original messages will come up on screen informing you your character wants another. It contains 120% of the daily recommended amount of sugar and, later in the series, the extended range included actually radioactive variants like Nuka Cola Quantum which glows bright purple, due to the wholesome addition of Strontium 90.

While these elements of Nuka Cola may seem to be intentionally ridiculous, and indicative of a much darker world than our own, we know caffeine is highly addictive. A 500ml bottle of Coca-Cola, for example, contains 53g of sugar which is actually 176% of the recommended daily allowance of sugar for an adult in the UK. And whilst Coca-Cola hasn’t actively put nuclear isotopes in its beer its bottled water Dasani was pulled from UK shelves for containing the carcinogenic chemical bromate.

I love Fallout. And I love its overt jabs at the lapse ethical standards of one of the world’s largest drinks manufacturers.

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For this recipe, I’m not going to make a totally game-accurate Nuka Cola, or even really something very close to modern colas. However, it will take some inspiration from it but be something to enjoy that’s probably a lot better for your health. In the original Fallout, we are told the ingredients of Nuka Cola are: Carbonated water, Caramel colouring, Aspartame, Phosphoric Acid, Potassium Benzoate, Natural Flavours, Citric Acid, and Caffeine.

In later games, we’re told Nuka Cola does also include sugar, and some of the natural flavourings are revealed to be fruit juices. We also know colas are usually flavoured with vanilla, cinnamon and other spices. Taking this as a base I’ve also added a couple of ingredients to give it a bit of heat for the ‘Nuka’ flavour (without the radiation.) The resulting recipe is less than 0.5% alcohol, with the sugar and yeast there for producing natural carbonation just like those old homebrew colonial sodas.

If you do give our Nuka Cola recipe a try, please leave a memo with our Mister Handy!

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Ingredients (quantities for a five-litre batch)

5L water

250g black treacle
120g aspartame
100g white sugar
2 limes
1 lemon
1 large orange
4 star anise
2 cinnamon sticks
5 tbsp freshly grated ginger
2 1/2 tbsp vanilla extract
½ tsp chilli powder

1 packet of wine yeast (any)

Process

1. Grate the zest of your fruits, and then extract their juice into a jug.

2. Heat the water until it begins to steam, (we do not need to get it to boiling, just warm enough to make mixing in the treacle easier.)

3. Slowly mix in the treacle to make a syrup.

4. Bring the syrup to a boil.

5. Add the rest of the ingredients, with the exception of the fruit juice and yeast which will be added later.

6. Boil for 20 minutes.

7. Strain the syrup through a sieve into another pan.

8. Allow the liquid to cool to room temperature, you can speed this cooling up with an ice bath or by putting the container in the fridge if these are viable for you, if you’re a homebrewer scaling up to a larger batch you can use a wort chiller.

9. Once cool, transfer the liquid to a demijohn or brewing bucket. Add the fruit juice and yeast.

10. Leave to ferment for one week at room temperature. This will not be a very vigorous ferment as there are limited sugars for the yeast to break down.

11. After one week, bottle as normal, adding ½ tsp of sugar per 500ml

12. Leave the bottles for another week to allow them to carbonate, pour over ice (add your favourite mixer if you’re so inclined) and enjoy!