CUBE-COLA
by James Flint 

On a table in a kitchen somewhere in the south-west of England two young women have assembled a variety of 
items. There are mysterious brown bottles, bags of white powder, a pestle and mortar, a variety of funnels, a 
roll of silver gaffer tape. There are thermometers and notepads covered with cryptic calculations. There is a 
drill. There is a mobile phone. There is a whisk.

What is happening here? Are they making bombs? Are they making drugs?

The truth is far more shattering. 

They're making fizzy cola. 

In some quarters, this could be seen as a hostile act - only last week [on 6th July] three people were 
charged in a US court charged with stealing trade secrets from Coca-Cola. But as artists whose work examines 
the structures of contemporary work and life, Kate Rich and Kayle Brandon are used to challenging corporate 
thinking.

They're also used to handling soft drinks. When not making art, Kate and Kayle manage the bar at the Cube 
Microplex, a volunteer-run cinema in central Bristol. According to its website, the Cube is run "by a proper 
left-field oddball crew" who promote DIY culture over the stuff that's dished out by mainstream media 
conglomerates. 

That means homemade films and old 35 mm prints, socially-traded "feral" coffee instead of skinny latte, a 
homemade theatre, an urban garden, and forums for local community groups. "In other words," says Kate with a 
smile, "we expend a great deal of energy on manufacturing the mundane."

Given this environment, it was only a matter of time before the pair asked themselves why they were selling 
Coca-Cola through their bar instead of something a little more, well, sound. "We started looking for an 
ethical alternative," Kayle explains, "but when we started looking at the other colas available, we couldn't 
find an alternative that our customers felt positive about in terms of taste."

Kate had a long history of working with technology activists in the US and the UK and was used to using "open 
source" software like Linux and Ubuntu in order to avoid paying for expensive versions from the likes of 
Microsoft. "The Cube computers are Linux-based and we had held various workshops and stuff for Linux 
programmers, so it made sense for us to look online to see if there was an open source cola recipe floating 
round out there."

It didn't take her long to stumble upon OpenCola, a promotional gimmick developed by a Toronto-based software 
company of the same name. Slightly bemused that the drink had proved more popular than their programming, the 
company had posted the recipe on their website, along with something called the GNU General Public License. 

"The GNU GPL is crucial to all this," Kayle points out. "It puts the recipe in the public domain. It was 
developed to so that people could create, pass on and improve software without it becoming proprietary at any 
point, but it has all sorts of different applications."

Getting hold of a list of ingredients, though, was only half of it. It took the two friends over two years of 
trial and error before they actually managed to turn the downloaded instructions into something they could 
serve in their customers' Cuba Libres.

Cola is basically a mix of caramel, caffeine, sugar, fizzy water, citric or phosphoric acid (citric for the 
slightly sweeter taste of Pepsi, phosphoric for the dryer feel of Coke) and eight essential oils. It's the 
precise blend of these oils that lies at the heart of Coca-Cola's famously guarded "7X" secret formula.
 
But the oils are only part of it. You've still got to mix them with your water which, as anyone who's made 
french dressing knows, is the tricky bit. "You need to make the oil droplets as tiny as possible, like 
pixels," Kayle tells me, her metaphor betraying her hacker-culture roots. "Then you have to coat them in a 
substance called an emulsifier, which will bind them to the water."

The emulsifier used in most soft drinks is gum arabic: acacia sap to you and me. But getting this curious 
substance to behave in the appropriate way requires some relatively advanced molecular chemistry skills. It 
was time to bring in some geeks. 

Fortunately they'd just met Richard Grove, a freelance scientist with a PhD in engineering ceramics who played 
cricket with local anarchist sports collective the Easton Cowboys. Excited by the project, he ended up doing a 
lot of background bookwork for them and even wrote a paper for their website. But it was Dr. Peter Barham, 
advisor to the Fat Duck restaurant and expert in food emulsification, who found the missing element in their 
recipe. 

Barham pointed out that the big soft-drinks manufacturers emulsify their ingredients in giant, 
super-high-powered industrial mixers. Chemistry alone was not enough: what was needed was brute force. Four 
broken food-processors later Kate and Kayle had a eureka moment: why not attach a handwhisk to a powerdrill? 
Suddenly, it all came together: 10 grams of gum arabic, 20 millilitres of oil, one drop of vodka and 10 
millilitres of the blendeds oil, drill-whisked in a plastic container and then added to appropriate quantities 
of caffeine, sugar and caramel, and they'd produced enough syrup to flavour 54 litres of cola - sufficient to 
fuel the Cube bar for a month. 

"We had no desire either to make Coke itself or some kind of healthy substitute," Kayle maintains. "We just 
wanted to produce something that would make our customers happy. That meant getting rid of the corporate 
baggage but keeping the sugar/caffeine hit, as that's part of what people drink cola for." 

They're now planning to sell concentrate kits to other small bars and businesses. By adding sugar and water 
themselves - ingredients significant enough to provide genuine local variation - they'd be creating their own 
"micro-brewed", site-specific drink.

"We do hope that along the way we'll help produce a small reality-shift," Kayle says. "Thinking you can make 
Coca-Cola is a bit like thinking you can make a powerstation or a Mars Bar. By moving Coke into the domestic 
realm, we're breaking that perception down, and doing something that's participatory and educational."

"It's social change through science and baking," adds Kate. "Sort of DIY Aesthetic meets the WI."

And who needs sugar and caffeine when you can unleash a force like that?


Original OpenCola site:
www.colawp.com/colas/400/cola467_recipe.html

Cube Microplex:
www.cubecinema.com

Cube-Cola fact site:
sparror.cubecinema.com/cube/cola/

GNU:
For more info about the GNU Operating System and GNU GPL, see: http://www.gnu.org/


Taste test: 

After an intrepid hour drinking the competing colas at my desk, I've produced the following report.

Coca-Cola (can sourced from my corner shop): 
Restrained sweetness, low cool notes of caramel, dry on tongue, quite flat on palette. Quite acidic, with a 
pleasing teeth- and tongue-coating effect. Very refreshing, but with little depth of taste.

Cube-Cola (sugar sourced from Kent-grown organic sugar beet, water from a bottle of Spa carbonated mineral 
water):
Very slighty sweeter than "the real thing", but less acidic, probably due to the use of citric instead of 
phosphoric acid (more, therefore, like Pepsi). Stronger taste of caramel, and definite overtones of cassia and 
nutmeg. A satisfying, complex flavour, with authentic teeth-coating effect. 
 

Cube-Cola Recipe:

orange oil
lime oil
lemon oil
cassia oil
nutmeg oil
coriander oil 
lavender oil 

gum arabic 
caramel colour
citric acid
caffeine
vodka (trace)
water

[Made available under GNU General Public License]

Composition instructions online at: sparror.cubecinema.com/cube/cola/