MAKING COCA COLA: WE ARE SOOO CLOSE!!

As many of you know, I've been trying to steal the Coca Cola secret formula with mass spectrometry for a few months now. And how close are we after all this time? Well...we're actually almost perfect!

Above, you can see the GC-MS spectrums for Coca Cola (top) and my Z-84 clone (bottom). Big thanks to "Neptunium" for his continual support with the analysis! Ignoring the height of certain peaks, they're almost identical! The main differences appear to be:

1. The amount of citrus oils in mine is potentially lower, making the background noise and other peaks appear higher

2. Coca Cola has a peak for ethyl levulinate. To be clear, this is most likely not an ingredient in Coca Cola...levulinic acid simply arises from the acid-catalyzed breakdown of sugars, and its esters could conceivably form in an acidic solution like Coca Cola if other ethyl esters are present. It could also come from natural ingredients like coca leaf extract, but since my processes couldn't introduce it naturally, I'll have to add a few micrograms artificially!

3. My cola has too much eucalyptol. That first medium (~40 relative abundance) peak on Coca Cola is limonene, while mine is eucalyptol. Coca Cola does have eucalyptol, but it's only a tiny bit. I was using about 3% eucalyptus oil to balance my cola's flavor, which is normally a bit too sweet/spiced without enough earthy/cooling plant flavors. Looks like I'll need to do a bit of tweaking!

The flavor is already very close, so hopefully with a few more trials, this recipe will finally be ready for release! I'm honestly quite proud of how far we've gotten. Most colas are vastly different from true Coca Cola, especially the homemade ones that are based on the ancient 1890's Pemberton recipe...that version is seriously outdated, with WAY too much spice, linalool-containing floral flavors (neroli, coriander, and orange), and the wrong blend of citrus (modern coke is almost exclusively lemon/lime, with no orange oil). Can't wait to share it, hopefully the video does well!