On a kitchen table two young women have assembled a variety of items. There are brown bottles, bags of white powder, a pestle and mortar, a collection of funnels, a roll of silver gaffer tape. There is a drill. There is a whisk.
Are they making bombs? Are they making drugs? No. They are doing something far more likely to change the world we live in. They're making their own version of Coca-Cola.
Codenamed "Merchandise 7X," the list of ingredients that go into Coke has been kept carefully shrouded in mystery since the drink's inventor, a medicinal chemist called John Pemberton, first wrote it down in 1886. These days it is supposedly kept under 24-hour guard in a vault in Atlanta, Georgia, which is odd considering that author Mark Pendergrast published it in his expose of the cola industry For God, Country & Coca-Cola in 1993. The company maintains that this recipe is not the same as the one it uses.
Kate Rich and Kayle Brandon are bar managers at the Cube Multiplex, an "alternative" cinema in Bristol in southwestern England. Opposed in principle to the business and environmental practices of the Coca-Cola corpora-tion, the Cube bar has never served Coke. That doesn't mean there isn't a demand for it.
"We'd tried Pepsi and Virgin Cola and various others too," says Brandon, "but they weren't really a positive alternative. They were acceptable, but they weren't Coke. And people really want Coke."
After conducting various taste tests, they felt the preference had less to do with flavor than the power of the brand. Any alternative they were going to offer had not only to taste almost identical but overcome the incredible pull of Coca-Cola's marketing.
DIY attitude
"Given that most of the Cube's customers come because they like the place's DIY attitude," Brandon explains, "one way of doing that was to make the cola ourselves."
Cola is basically a mix of caramel, caffeine, sugar, fizzy water, citric or phosphoric acid and eight essential oils. It's the precise blend of these oils that lies at the heart of the 7X secret formula.
A trawl of the Web soon uncovered several 7X-type recipes, the most promising of which was adapted from the one in Pendergrast's book.
But turning the recipe into a palatable drink turned out to be more difficult than it looked.
"The oils we had to import from the US," says Rich. "The caramel had to be sourced direct from DD Williamson, a large operation based in Manchester which provides the caramel for all the Coca-Cola manufactured in the UK. And the caffeine we found at a body-building Web site."
When they had assembled most of the kit, they invited friends along to an "open lab" to help them make the drink.
"Unfortunately none of us had any scientific knowledge, and it's quite a scientific process," Rich says. "We spent half our time running out to get ingredients that we didn't have."
Though they came up with something like cola by the end of that first day, they couldn't replicate their success. The problem was getting the oils to mix with the other ingredients, a process called emulsification, or binding together.
The emulsifier used in most soft drinks is dried acacia sap, better known as gum arabic. But Rich and Brandon couldn't get this to work.
"We managed to destroy a whole series of kitchen mixers, completely trashed them. The gum arabic scoured the sides, the blades snapped ... it was really violent and very distressing," Rich says.
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