Get this Peach Soda recipe from Dean Buchanan

Perth bartender and booze brand entrepeneur Dean Buchanan spent the first few months of this year off the sauce. "At the start of the year, I wanted to change a couple of things about myself," he told us recently.

"I started off, almost 12 weeks — three months — without drinking. I tried to really focus on my own mental health and my own business going forward and just wanted to make this year something really, really big for me," Buchanan said.

But the break from booze didn't mean that Buchanan took a break from creating recipes — instead, he took a non-alcoholic turn.

"So I had a lot of fun at the start of the year creating a lot of non-alcoholic drinks and exploring that world, which was super cool," he said.

The result was recipes like this one for Peach Soda that we have below. Buchanan approached the drink and used techniques he often employs in his alcoholic recipes; the difference here is that he makes liberal use of the rotary evaporator to distil without creating alcohol.

Get the recipe below.

Peach Soda
Ingredients

• 6kg fresh ripe peaches
• 5 litres of water
• sugar
• citric acid
• salt

Instructions

1. Juice or press the peaches and record the volume of juice (roughly 3 litres is what you’ll get).
2. Keep the pulp and macerate into 5 litres of water for 30 hours. Strain off pulp and keep aside.
3. Blend juice and peach water together and record the volume. Add the pulp back into the blend and then distill on the water setting on a rotary evaporator at 49 degrees. Depending on how big your flasks are you may need to do this in several batches.
4. Once you have your distilled peach water add 80g of sugar, 2.75g of citric acid and a pinch of salt per 5 litres of distilled peach water.
5. Stir to dissolve in sugar, acid and salt then decant into carbonation bottles and place in fridge to cool. Once cold,  carbonate twice at 40psi.
6. To serve, pour 120ml into a chilled wine glass.

Recipe by Dean Buchanan, Perth.