The current owners of Dr. Brown's Soda discontinued the diet form of Cel-Ray. Cel-Ray is great stuff; not liking it is a sign of an immature palate. So, I'm trying to fake up some Diet Cel-Ray. I figured I needed some sort of liquid celery flavoring and maybe Diet Canada Dry, since Cel-Ray has been said to taste a bit like ginger ale.

Rather than look for liquid celery flavoring, I made my own. Lena suggested infusing the celery into vodka. I tried this, but instead of celery I used crushed celery seed. I added a similar volume of sugar, since this seems to help many other flavors infuse into vodka: evidently, I'm doing alchemy rather than chemistry. I made two batches; one with about 15g of celery seed in .2l of vodka (for making soda), and one with 10g of celery seed in .5l of vodka with no sugar (for making Bloody Marys or something - I had all this extra vodka and was running out of celery seed...) I used Ketel One, which is a decent vodka - the internet suggests that good vodka is going to have less strong flavor of its own, which is what I wanted. And, even premium vodka is not all that expensive - a .75l bottle of Ketel One is about $20.

Once it had sat for three days, the stronger batch was starting to get a little bit of bitter taste, which is a sign that the spice has been infusing long enough. After pouring both batches through a coffee filter to remove the seeds, I put 5 tsp of the strong batch into a can of (regular) Canada Dry; that was too much. (I had previously tried 3 tsp - in retrospect, that was about right, so I may have enough here to do a 12-pack, and theoretically the full bottle could do 50 cans in this manner). It doesn't taste like Cel-Ray, it tastes like ginger ale with a strong celery flavor, but it has about the right amount of celery flavor.

Next I'll experiment with different sodas.