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It's Pathological

No, really, I can't help picking up every single hobby I even tangentially learn about. All of them. For example, I've more-or-less-emphasis-on-the-more decided to learn to brew kombucha, because I like it and as nice as the kombucha man at the farmers market is, he now owns a $4 piece of my soul and I'm going to be very sad at the end of market season.

So I checked out a book on brewing from the library (True Brews, by Emma Christensen). And then I made yeast-fermented mango soda, because of course I did. (I don't have access to a scoby for kombucha-ing yet, so that was also an element of the decision.)

A close-up of large chunks of fresh mango partially submerged in clear liquid, in a clear glass bowl.
It took all my willpower not to just eat all that mango.
Three mangoes, roughly chopped. Easiest done by peeling and then hacking off bits of mango, rather than separating the hemispheres of fruit and dicing the flesh off the skin. They got to hang out in hot sugar-water to start breaking down the fruit while I did some dishes and dug out the food processor.

A clear pyrex beaker with red markings and a tiny pool of mango juice on the bottom, with a large black-handled strainer full of pureed mango balanced on top. A few droplets of mango are hanging from the lowest curve of the strainer.
This is a real-time video.
Pureeing the mango was...messy. I did batches, because the strainer is only so large and (more crucially) the Pyrex I was straining has a smaller opening than the size of the strainer. So. Little batches of pureed mango, plopped into the strainer, and...stubbornly sitting there. Taunting me.

A black-handled strainer with about half a cup of thick mango puree in the bottom, and a blue silicone spatula resting on the bottom of the strainer.
Scrape scrape scrape scrape.
I encouraged it to strain faster with a spatula, some brute force, and some frankly obscene noises.

A clear pyrex beaker with red markings, holding about 650 milliliters of brilliant gold mango juice.
I should've photographed the imperial measurements side. That's about 2.75 cups.
Voila, mango juice! Er, goo. Something more liquid than the original mango, anyway, and I did get most of the fruit pureed fine enough to serve the purpose.

Mango juice pouring in a thin stream from a clear pyrex beaker into an empty, clear plastic 2-liter bottle. A variety of tomatoes, some small green-and-blush apples, and a large ridged loaf of bread fill the counter in the background.
I didn't even spill. Not a drop.
Next, the mango juice/liquid/goo went into my empty 2-liter bottle, and got topped off with plain old water to mostly fill the bottle.

A grey packet of champagne and sparkling wine yeast, with the "Lalvin" label and other writing in white and mauve, on a pale wooden cutting board.
Fancy Yeast For Which I Quested.
And I added an eighth teaspoon of fancy yeast. (An eighth teaspoon, that's it, and I have enough yeast in this packet alone to make like twelve gallons of soda at that rate. I bought three packets. ACK.)

A 2-liter tonic water bottle, mostly full of bright gold-yellow liquid with about an inch of foam on top, on a counter crowded with tomatoes, apples, a cucumber, and a loaf of bread.
It pleases me immensely that the nascent soda matches the label.
Then capped the soda and shook it up to distribute the yeast, and set it on the counter to ferment.

A redheaded white woman, poised with a spoonful of bright-yellow mango puree, smiling with her eyes. The wall behind her is grey, with a white-framed door centered around her, and a small print of idealized mountains above her head. Her hair is pulled back, and she's wearing a brown shirt and a thin gold necklace.
Hashtag no filter.
Also, I got to eat the leftover mango puree that was too thick to make it through the strainer. That was a very good decision, despite the questionable wisdom of putting this photo on the internet.

A close-up of dense, gold-yellow liquid in the top of a clear 2-liter bottle, with foam on top and large, defined air pockets pressed against the sides of the bottle.
So you know the yellow tang in Finding Nemo who's obsessed with the tank bubbler? That was me when I saw these.
And guess what! The next morning, almost exactly twelve hours after setting the soda to ferment, it was enthusiastically burbling away! Bubbles! That I made! (Kinda.)

I did try to get a video of the bubbles forming, but the instant I got my camera out, they went shy. Close the camera? Bubbles. Open camera? n o t h i n g. Jerks.

A clear pint glass on a white table, slightly backlit, about three-quarters full of opaque gold-yellow soda with a thin rim of bubbles around the edge of the liquid. A giant zucchini looms in the background.
This looks very much like the mango Jumex + fizzy water I typically do for a sweet drink.
All this soda-making activity was in hopes of having a cool thing to take along on a weekend trip with the gang from college—and it worked, in part because I thought about the likely result of putting a pressurized bottle of sugar-water and active yeast into a warm car for seven hours of driving, and released the pressure before we took off.

We tried some with vodka, and decided it was not bad, but the yeast flavor was pretty noticeable. I think I could get away with an even tinier amount of yeast, although I don't know if that would reduce the yeastiness or just lengthen the fermentation time. The important thing here is that we didn't finish the soda. We left the bottle half-drunk, and I brought it home with me.

By the time I finally tasted some on its own, it had been nearly a week since I started it, and the alcohol content had clearly...risen. I now have hard mango soda, which I think I need to drink fairly quickly before it turns into something bizarre and undrinkable.

A close-up of gold-yellow opaque soda, showing the thin rim of bubbles on the surface and, faintly, small bubbles in the body of the liquid.
BUBBLES.
And yes, it is bubbly. It's recarbonated at least four times now. I am very impressed with this yeast, and more than a little terrified of it.

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