This video has been sponsored by Opera. A few years ago I turned plastic gloves into grape soda and now I want to try turning paint thinner into cherry soda. This is something that I've been wanting to try for a while and at first it might sound like it makes no sense. Especially because of how horrible tasting and toxic paint thinner is. However just like the grape soda and all of the other transformations that I've done over the years it should be possible. This is because a lot of paint thinners contain a solvent called toluene which I guess is good at thinning paints. On its own toluene isn't super special but what I find is interesting is how similar it is to this chemical called benzaldehyde which is commonly used as a cherry flavor. In my opinion it's almost shocking how close they are and the only difference is this small extra part here. Other than that though they're basically the same and it's really weird to me that such a small change makes it go from tasting gasoline to fruit. But anyway in theory considering how close they already are it should be possible to convert one into the other. Based on this my goal was to get some paint thinner and extract the toluene turn that into cherry flavor by using chemistry and science and then use that to make some hopefully tasty cherry soda. On paper this all seemed relatively simple but in practice this conversion can actually be annoying and I wasn't evensure how to do it. I decided to just get started anyway though and the first thing that I needed was some paint thinner. I was a bit worried that it would be hard to find a toluene-based one but they apparently had exactly what I was looking for at my local hardware store. It was actually advertised as being entirely toluene which I was really happy to see because it meant that I might not have to purify it. At the same time though it said that it was professional grade which didn't really mean anything and it was very possible that it contained some nasty impurities. I was going to have to do a quick test on it by sucking a bunch of it out and shooting it into a mixture of sulfuric acid and something called isatin. The thing that I was most concerned about were some stinky sulfur impurities and in theory if they were present it should cause it to turn blue. After sitting there for about 10 minutes though there was clearly no blue color which was a very good sign. This told me that the toluene was probably pure enough to use it directly and the only thing that I had to do now was get rid of any water that might be in it. This was thankfully pretty easy and I just poured a bunch of it into a small bottle along with something called 3A molecular sieves that I got from Amazon. These little beads are able to selectively pull out the water and all I had to do was let it sit here for about a day. Now that I had my paint thinner pretty much ready to go all I had to do next was figure out how I was actually going to do it. In theory there were probably several methods that I could have used but I felt that I only had one real option. This is because one of the methods called the Étard reaction seemed to be the easiest and it also used a chemical that just happened to be one of my favorites. This chemical in particular is called chromyl chloride and I actually made this entire tube of it a few years ago. It was sealed in glass because it's toxic carcinogenic and highly volatile but it was finally time to crack it open. When I felt ready I tipped it over into the flask and I was greeted with a really nice blood red liquid which was all the chromyl chloride. It was also letting off a bunch of nasty fumes and it was really important to not breathe in any of this. But anyway with everything safely in the flask I temporarily sealed it and now I could start doing some chemistry. So I went and got a large flask and I carefully added 10g of the toluene paint thinner. On top of this I dumped in 40mL of a solvent called DCM which would dilute the toluene. I'll explain why this is very important in a bit. After that I dropped in a stir bar and I lowered the entire flask into a large dish that was sitting on a stir plate. With all of this in place things were looking pretty good and now I just had to add a few things above the flask. I just quickly dropped in a thermometer an addition funnel and a condenser column. To the end of the condenser I also added a little tube filled with calcium chloride which would prevent any moisture from getting into the setup. With all this glassware in place I went back to the addition funnel and I dumped in 45mL of DCM. On top of this what I had to do next was add my beautiful chromyl chloride so I went over to my little flask of it and I carefully opened it. Even more carefully I was going to have to pour some of it into a graduated cylinder. The goal here was to measure out a little bit more than 15mL and I had to be really careful to not spill any of it. It all thankfully went really well though and when I was eventually done I took all of this scary blood red liquid and I dumped it into the addition funnel. With it all loaded in things seem to be going pretty well so far until I noticed that the funnel sucked and it was leaking chromyl chloride. This was actually a huge pain but I was able to quickly transfer it to a new funnel and I washed it down with some more DCM. I also stirred it around to make sure that it was fully mixed and that was about it. Now with that whole crisis averted I was almost ready to start the reaction. The only other thing that I had to do was go back to the large dish add some water and ice and turn on the stirring. This cooling step was actually extremely important and I found many sources that said if it weren't cooled properly it could potentially explode. I even found a firsthand account of this happening on a chemistry forum and I would be lying if I said that this didn't make me a bit nervous to do it. It was supposed to be fine though as long as I kept the temperature below around 45°C which shouldn't be hard if I just went slowly and carefully. But anyway at this point it should have been cold enough and I guess it was time to start the reaction. To get things going all I had to do was slowly open the funnel and a bunch of the chromyl chloride started dripping into the flask. Almost immediately it was all turning brown which I felt was a good sign. This is because the reaction between the chromyl chloride and the toluene is supposed to form a complex called the Étard complex which is described as being brown. The only problem is that the formation of this complex is also supposed to release a lot of heat which as I mentioned earlier could lead to an explosion. This is why it was really important to add things slowly and to cool it and why it was also very important to dilute everything with DCM. By doing all of this it would make it much easier to keep the reaction under control and in theory there should be little to no risk of exploding. With that being said though I just kept adding the chromyl chloride in small spurts and I was very careful to keep the temperature low. This ended up taking a few hours and by the time I was done it didn't look like too much had happened. I still just had some dark black liquid and according to some procedures I just had to let it stir for a couple more hours. There were others though that said it could explode if stirring were stopped too soon so I decided to just let it stir overnight. When I came back to it in the morning it thankfully hadn't exploded and what I had to do next was take this whole thing apart. I quickly popped out the condenser and I took away the funnel and the thermometer. I was then able to pull the flask itself off the stand and what I had now was a nasty mixture of DCM and unreactive chromyl chloride and hopefully a bunch of Étard complex. The only issue is that it looked like the complex had become a thick sludge and it was all stuck to the bottom of the flask. A lot of papers also said that it wasn't just the reaction and that the complex itself is explosive which made this situation even more difficult. I figured that the best way to loosen it though was to just hold it over a stir plate and to let the stir bar gently break it apart. This actually works surprisingly well and after several minutes I felt that it was looking pretty good. I then decided to try and pour it all out into a beaker and I was happy to see that almost everything was transferred. Just to really make sure that I got all of it though I washed the flask a couple times with some DCM. Now with everything safely out of the flask the next thing that I had to do was decompose the scary Étard complex. To do that though it was supposed to be pretty simple and I just had to get another beaker with some water in it and to add something called sodium sulfite. When it had all dissolved I added in a bunch more and on top of this I kept throwing in ice. Eventually I had an ice-cold and saturated solution of sodium sulfite and it was time to quickly go back and grab my reaction mixture. To destroy the complex all I had to do was carefully pour it in in very small portions. It was hard to tell what was happening but the complex was supposed to be reacting with the water. The water should have been splitting it apart into my hopefully beautiful and amazing cherry flavor and into a bunch of nasty chromium junk. The only tricky part here is that the benzaldehyde is somewhat sensitive and prone to oxidation and this is why I included a bunch of sodium sulfite. All the sodium sulfite should almost immediately react with anything that might damage the benzaldehyde and help keep it safe. What was also a very good sign was that I would occasionally get hit with a strong and sweet cherry smell which told me that I was probably making benzaldehyde. But anyway I eventually added the last bit of my reaction mixture and the explosion risk was thankfully over. I then let it stir for another 20 minutes and now assuming that the benzaldehyde was actually in there I had to somehow get it out. This wasn't supposed to be super hard though and I just had to pour it all into a big separated funnel and it all quickly started separating. The lower layer was all the DCM from the reaction and it should have contained most of the benzaldehyde. To separate it I just open the valve and I carefully drained it into a beaker. I then went back to the water that was left behind in the funnel and I dumped in a bunch of fresh DCM. After that I capped it and shook it around vigorously and I was doing this to try to get out as much of the benzaldehyde as possible. This is because it's a lot more soluble in DCM and in theory if any of it were still left behind it should be pretty easily pulled from the water. I then drain this DCM into the same beaker as before and just to really make sure that I got out everything I did this washing step a few more times. When I was done I was left with a gross and cloudy yellow liquid and I was going to have to clean it up a bit. I transferred it all back into a fresh separatory funnel and I washed it with some distilled water followed by some saturated salt water. This caused it to change quite a bit and for the milkiness to mostly disappear and I felt that it was looking a lot better. It was still a bit cloudy though probably because there was some water in it and I was going to have to dry it up. I transferred it to a stir plate dropped in a stir bar and added a bunch of magnesium sulfate. This would selectively react with any water that was in there and pull it out of the DCM. After stirring for a while I felt that it was looking good and I filtered it directly into a round bottom flask. I was really hoping to see a nice and clear solution come through but it honestly looked the same except it was maybe a little lighter. Either way up until this point things seemed to be going really well and to isolate the benzaldehyde I just had to get rid of the DCM. I started setting it up for a distillation by adding a three-way adapter a thermometer and a condenser column. I then put the rest of it together and this was what the entire setup looked like. To get started I just turned on the heating mantle and the stirring and within a few minutes it was already boiling. I was also collecting some nice and clean DCM in the beaker and now all I had to do was wait. Over the next 20 minutes the DCM slowly boiled away and eventually I was left with a dark oily liquid. In theory this should have been mostly benzaldehyde but it looked insanely dirty and if I planned on eating this it was going to have to be at least a bit cleaner. I carefully transferred it all to a much smaller flask and I figured that I just had to do another distillation. This time though the setup was going to be a bit more complicated because I had to do it under vacuum. If I did it with any air present the benzaldehyde might get destroyed and this was the setup that I put together. It was really similar to the first one except for this part with three flasks attached to it but that will all make sense in a minute. Either way when I felt that I was ready I just turned on the heating and stirring and I waited for it to heat up. Eventually it started boiling and vapors were climbing the column and I started collecting something in the flask. At this point though everything coming over was just side products and other junk. However the temperature of the vapor was slowly rising and when it eventually got to the boiling point of benzaldehyde I carefully switched it over to the next flask. The temperature then stopped increasing and it stayed solid at the boiling point and this was a very good sign. It meant that I was now collecting what should be some nice and pure benzaldehyde and I was very happy to see this. After about 20 minutes I'd collected quite a bit and the temperature started rising again so I switched it to the third flask. I also turned off the heating mantle because at this point the distillation was done. Left in the original flask was a bunch of nasty dark tar and I just had to wait for everything to cool down. I let it sit there for about 10 minutes before releasing the vacuum and then I carefully popped off all the flasks. This was what I was left with labeled in the order that I collected things and I immediately got rid of the first and the last because they were just junk. The one in the middle should have contained my nice and pure benzaldehyde and I transferred it all to a little vial. Up until now things seem to be going super well and I was honestly surprised by how smoothly it had all gone. Chemistry is usually a huge pain but sometimes it just works. I figured that this was one of those times. To celebrate I decided to take a proper smell of my sweet and cherry benzaldehyde and I was immediately brought back to reality. Not only did it not smell anything like cherry it smelled like hydrochloric acid and it burned to my nostrils. There was also a lingering burn that continued lasting for hours and it made my eyes water a bit. This was definitely not the cherry flavor that I was looking for and I was immediately very confused. This is not only because it had the exact same boiling point as benzaldehyde. I had also run something called a TLC and it matched up perfectly as well. Clearly though this was something else and I decided to do one last test. I went and got a small beaker and I added 1.7g of sodium bisulfite followed by 4mL of water and a stir bar. I then stirred it until it all dissolved, and when I felt that I was ready it was time to dump in all my mystery oil. If this were actually benzaldehyde it should all quickly react with the sodium bisulfite and turn into a solid. I patiently waited for a bunch of solid stuff to appear but after letting it stir for over 20 minutes I had to accept that nothing was going to happen. On the bright side though I could now definitively say that this wasn't benzaldehyde and I'm pretty sure that it was actually benzyl chloride which chemically looks pretty close. Benzyl chloride is horrible though and it was used in World War I as a tear gas and it wasn't exactly the amazing cherry flavor I was hoping for. But either way at this point I had no idea what had gone wrong. I had done almost exactly what all the procedures had said and assuming that they weren't all lies it should have worked. Clearly though I had made some sort of mistake and I was going to have to figure it out. The only problem was that I had no idea what to do and on top of this I only had enough chromyl chloride for one more attempt. I did the only logical thing that I could think of and I just gave up. It wasn't until two years later that I finally got the motivation to try it again and I had some ideas that I really felt would fix everything. My first idea was that instead of using DCM which might have been causing some problems I wanted to try using the solvent that was originally used for this reaction when it was first discovered over 100 years ago. This solvent in particular is called carbon tetrachloride and it's actually pretty similar to DCM. However unlike DCM it has actually been internationally banned for most uses because it's not only toxic it also depletes the ozone layer. Getting it now can be hard and expensive but 7 years ago I was able to get this for free and I guess it was finally time to use it. Besides just changing the solvent though my second major idea was that this time I would isolate the Étard complex which as I mentioned before was supposed to be explosive. This was why in my first attempt I did the safer method out of fear and I destroyed it while it was still mixed with the DCM. However I found some procedures that suggested filtering it off and isolating it because it supposedly gave a purer result. Again though considering that it's often described as being an explosive intermediate and that isolating it probably makes it more sensitive. I was afraid of exploding. However at this point I was pretty desperate to make it work and I was willing to do anything that was necessary. Then on top of all of this just for good measure I bubbled argon gas through the chromyl chloride to knock out any HCL that might be present. After that I also distilled it and this gave me chromyl chloride that I knew was absolutely pure. I also distilled the carbon tetrachloride as well as the toluene and at this point I felt that I was pretty much good to go and there was literally nothing more that I could do. So I just went ahead and got started and I put together almost exactly the same setup as before except this time it was all prepared using carbon tetrachloride instead of DCM. I would also be cooling it with just regular water instead of ice water and when I felt that I was ready I opened the funnel and I started the reaction. Just like the first time all of the chromyl chloride turned brown the moment that it hit and it pretty much looked exactly the same. I then kept adding it at a slow and steady pace and I carefully watched the temperature. Even without the ice water it actually didn't rise that much and a few hours later I was left with some familiar black liquid. I then let it stir overnight to prevent a potential explosion and in the morning it was looking pretty good. What I had to do now was take the whole thing apart and this was when the procedure would really start to change. Unlike last time I was going to have to separate out all of this potentially explosive stuff and I wasn't exactly feeling excited about it. Okay so now the fun part. Where we get to filter it. The only good part was that the setup was pretty simple and I basically just needed a vacuum filter. Just for good measure though I also added a small tube which would shoot in argon gas and protect everything from air and moisture. This unfortunately wouldn't prevent an explosion or anything but it was supposed to help stop the complex from degrading. But anyway when I eventually felt that I was ready I carefully started pouring it into the filter. I was actually able to transfer pretty much everything and with it all safely in the filter I turned on the vacuum pump. This immediately started pulling away the nasty liquid and eventually I was left with a scary puck of black powder. Now all I had to do was wash this puck and the flask with a bunch more carbon tetrachloride. I was doing this to get rid of as much side product and other junk as possible and after doing this several times I felt that it was as clean as it was going to get. Up until this point things had been going surprisingly well and the only thing left to do was to dry it. So I left the vacuum pump on and I carefully mixed it around and this was the part that I was most nervous about. This is because in theory if this were anything like most explosives it would get more and more unstable as it dried. So as I stirred it I slowly got more and more anxious. Thankfully though I didn't explode and after several minutes I felt that it was dry enough. What I had now should have been a bunch of Étard complex and I could actually smell the benzyl aldehyde coming off of it which was a very good sign. However before moving on I felt that I had to see just how unstable it was. For a little test I took a small amount of it and I hit it with a hammer. I was expecting it to make a pop or a bang or something but it didn't really do anything even after I bashed it many times. This told me that it wasn't super shock sensitive but it could still be explosive and I wanted to try lighting it on fire. I was expecting it to at least flare up like it was gunpowder or something but again nothing really happened. At some point it all quickly degraded but besides that it was almost shockingly tame. The moment that I saw this I was relieved that I wasn't actually working with a horribly explosive chemical. At the same time though I was disappointed that I didn't get any cool explosions and I have no idea why it's often described as being explosive. It's possible that it still just wasn't dry enough and there was too much carbon tetrachloride still there but I don't know. Anyway though getting back to what I was actually trying to do the next step was to degrade all of this complex and hopefully turn it into cherry flavor. To do this I just had to mix up another fresh and cold solution of sodium sulfite and slowly add in the powder. This time the reaction was a lot slower but like before the complex should have been reacting with the water and splitting apart into benzaldehyde and a bunch of chromium junk. The major difference this time though was that because I isolated the powder I wasn't also adding a bunch of extra chromyl chloride unreactive toluene and side products from the original reaction. So if I were making benzaldehyde here it should be relatively pure. But anyway when I eventually added all of the powder I let it stir for 15 minutes just to make sure that it all degraded. I then transferred all of this to a separatory funnel and this purification step was basically the same as last time. The only difference was that again I used carbon tetrachloride instead of DCM. I then thoroughly shook it around just like before and waited for the layers to separate and I drained each washing into a beaker. When I was eventually done this was what I had and I was hoping that all the benzaldehyde was in there. It was definitely going to have to be cleaned up a bit though so I put it all back into a fresh separatory funnel and I washed it with water and saturated salt solution. This easily got rid of most of that gross green chromium junk and what I was left with was already looking a lot better than the first attempt. It was way less cloudy and not nearly as yellow and it was actually feeling really good about it. There was still a bit of water in it though so I dropped in a stir bar turned on the stirring and dumped in a bunch` of magnesium sulfate drying agent. I then let this stir for a while and after about 20 minutes I filtered it directly into a flask. Unlike last time this actually gave me a nice and clear solution. And now in theory all I had to do was get rid of the solvent. So I quickly put together the same distillation setup and I cranked up the heating. I then waited for it all to distill over and as it slowly decreased I was actually feeling really hopeful. This was not only because it was looking way cleaner than the first attempt it was also because I had seen how much Étard complex I had made. It was actually a huge amount and in my mind there was no way that I wouldn't get a bunch of benzaldehyde out of it. The only problem was that by the time it was done and all the solvent was gone I barely had anything left. Even if I assumed that this was nearly pure benzaldehyde the amount was still almost pathetic and it wouldn't be enough to make my cherry soda. The only good thing was that it actually smelled like benzaldehyde this time and it only slightly burned my nose in my eyes. I just didn't understand what had gone wrong though and I hated how familiar this feeling was. This time I was also even more confused because I had isolated such a huge amount of the Étard complex which had clearly smelled like benzaldehyde. For a second I considered that maybe I was just bad at chemistry which was very possible but I felt that it was much more likely that the carbon tetrachloride had just somehow not extracted it properly. It was very possible that the solvent I'd been saving for almost a decade had failed me and I was going to have to go on a salvage mission. I threw the whole reaction mixture back into a separatory funnel and I did everything again except with diethyl ether. I then shook it around like every other time and waited for the layers to separate. Except this time they didn't because a bunch of solid chromium salt had precipitated. Many procedures suggested that adding acid could fix this though so I added some dilute hydrochloric acid and it seemed to work pretty well. The ether layer was actually able to separate and I did this extraction a few more times. I then combined everything and washed it with water and sodium bicarbonate dried it and started distilling it. I was really hoping that the ether would save me and that a bunch of benzaldehyde would just magically appear. But it was somehow even worse than I could have ever imagined. I didn't just not get very much of it. I literally got nothing. So it apparently wasn't an issue with the solvent that I'd used. And after seeing this I started getting very worried that the other theory might be true. What was even worse though was that I officially had absolutely no idea how to fix this and I honestly felt like just quitting again. But I really didn't want to have to revisit this in another two years. So instead of just immediately giving up I decided to at least try one desperate attempt to fix it. It made zero sense but I again went back and got the original reaction and I dumped half of it back into the separatory funnel. I then poured in a bunch of sodium carbonate which was pretty much the opposite of what I had done before. I was now making it more basic instead of acidic and I was a bit worried that it would make the chromium salts come back but it was apparently fine. On top of this I also added some diethyl ether and I extracted it several times. I then did the same thing on the other half and combined everything washed it dried it and transferred it all to a flask. After that I did the same distillation as before to get rid of the solvent and I was honestly expecting it to just fail again. However at some point it looked like the volume stopped decreasing and I was actually left with a bunch of slightly yellow oil. Apparently adding the base had magically done something and the moment that I saw this I was pretty excited. I had no idea how much of this were actually benzaldehyde but even if it were half it would still be a lot better than the first recovery. For that one I got way less and it was a lot more yellow but there was probably at least some benzaldehyde in there so I decided to combine everything. At this point things were looking way better than I could have ever expected and I'm really glad I didn't just quit. The only issue was that this was all still really impure and it definitely wasn't something I'd want to eat. To purify it though there weren't many options and because of that tear gas side product with such a similar boiling point I definitely couldn't distill it. In my mind this left me with only one real option and that was to try and use sodium bisulfite. I added a small amount of it to a beaker along with about 15mL of water. I then turned on the stirring and when it had eventually dissolved it was time to add all my oil. Considering that when I did this for the first attempt it was a total failure. I was honestly a bit scared. It's finally the moment I've been waiting for. However there wasn't anything that I could do about that and I just dumped it all in. I was really hoping that it would almost instantly solidify but it just looked like it did with the first attempt. It was just a bunch of oil floating around in some water and I honestly started getting really concerned. It's not doing anything. However over the next few minutes it slowly got cloudier and cloudier and it eventually formed a little ball. The moment that I saw this I knew that I had successfully made benzaldehyde and I was immediately relieved. It actually worked. But anyway what was forming here was something called a benzaldehyde sodium bisulfite adduct. Right now it was all clumped as a ball because the reaction wasn't done yet. I just let it continue stirring and over the next 20 minutes the ball slowly fell apart. Eventually it had completely disintegrated and what I had to do next was isolate all of this bisulfite adduct. I just quickly poured it all into a filter and I turned on my vacuum pump to pull away the water. I then poured in some diethyl ether except now none of the benzaldehyde would be soluble because it was all trapped as the adduct. The magical part though was that everything that wasn't benzaldehyde was still soluble especially that tear gas stuff and it would all get washed away. Just to make sure that it was as clean as possible I washed it several more times with ether and when I was done I had some crispy white powder. In theory this was a bunch of nice and pure benzaldehyde adduct but it didn't smell anything like cherries and I was going to have to turn it back into benzaldehyde. Thankfully this was supposed to be pretty easy to do and I just had to add a concentrated solution of sodium carbonate to a small separatory funnel. Then after that to get the reaction started I just had to dump in all of my powder. The moment that it touched the sodium carbonate it should have been reacting and the bisulfite adduct was supposed to be falling apart. It was supposed to be decomposing back into just regular sodium bisulfite and releasing the benzaldehyde. To really make sure that it would all react I shook it around and added a bunch more base and after that I was really excited by what I saw. At the top there was clearly a layer of oil forming and this was my nice and pure benzaldehyde. In an ideal world I could have just sucked the oil layer off the top but the water was still super cloudy which told me that a bunch of it hadn't separated. To get out all of it I would have to use diethyl ether again and I dumped in a decent amount. I then shook it around just like every other time and when I was done the difference was pretty obvious. Basically all of the benzaldehyde was now in that upper ether layer and I carefully drained away the water. I then did the super lazy method and I just dumped the drying agent directly into the funnel. Now the only thing left to do was to get rid of the ether. For hopefully the very last time I filtered everything into a small flask. I also chose to completely skip the distillation and I just attached my vacuum pump and I pulled a vacuum. Then after that I patiently waited and I watched the volume slowly go down and eventually it thankfully stopped decreasing. What I was left with looked like a really nice and almost colorless oil and the moment that I saw this I was really relieved. I was almost 100% sure that this was pure benzaldehyde and the struggle was finally over. Just to be absolutely sure that it was pure though I had to do something called an H-NMR. I took a small sample of it and loaded it into the machine and this was the result that I got. It basically confirmed that I had some nice and pure benzaldehyde and now I could taste it without worrying that it would instantly kill me. I could also finally use it to make my cherry soda but before doing that I felt that I had to know what pure benzaldehyde tasted like. Okay not this little pipette tip. Oh that's so much worse than I thought. Oh. It's horrible. It burns. It's bitter. Awful. Okay that was pretty much as bad as I expected because flavors on their own are usually pretty nasty. With that being said though it was now finally time to try and make some amazing cherry soda and I decided to go with the same base recipe that I used for the grape soda. The only difference was that I used even more sugar and I added about 65g. Then on top of this I added 1.5g of citric acid and 0.1g of ascorbic acid and I filled it up with a bunch of distilled water. It of course wouldn't be real cherry soda without the color so I also added some green food dye. Then after that I added a stir rod that was covered with red dye and I mixed it around. Eventually it was looking pretty good and I now had the base of the soda. At this point though it was just red-colored sugar water and the last thing that I had to add was my tasty benzaldehyde. I wasn't exactly sure how much I had to use but based on something that I found online it said that fruit juice usually contained 124ppm and up to around 300. Most juices also have a bunch of other flavors though and considering I'd only be using benzaldehyde I decided to go with the max amount. I quickly pulled out about 0.15mL and I shot it into the soda base. Normally benzaldehydes almost completely insoluble in water but I think that the citric acid I included acts as an emulsifier and allows it to actually dissolve. Either way though I now had some really artificial cherry juice and all I had to do was carbonate it. To do this I just used one of those home carbonation things and I blasted it with a bunch of CO2 gas. Then when I eventually felt that it was looking good I carefully took it off and now I was apparently done. I could finally try the cherry soda that I had worked so hard for and I was just hoping that it wouldn't be terrible. It smells good. It smells like super fake cherry. It's actually good. I'm like shocked. I feel like this is one of the first things I've ever made that it's good. It just tastes good. I think it tastes pretty close to just regular cherry soda. I mean with just beans aldehyde it's not exactly the most complex flavor profile but it's 90% there just as an objective rating. It's like an eight on ten maybe a seven. No okay no an eight on ten. I could 100% serve this to people and they would have no idea that it was made from paint thinner. Okay so my paint thinner soda turned out to be way better than I thought and I'm still kind of shocked that it really did just taste like regular soda. To me this made it even more of a success and I'm glad that I didn't actually completely give up on this project. I still don't really understand why it was such a pain but I think that trying to extract the aldehyde with a solvent like many procedures said to do just doesn't work very well. Either way though I'm just happy that in the end I was actually able to do it and that I was able to turn a horrible combination of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals into a beautiful cherry soda. Now on a bit more of a personal note I think that some of you might have noticed that I haven't been posting a lot of videos lately. The reason for this is complicated and it's a combination of moving workspaces making shorts working on a lot of big projects and honestly a lack of organization. All of this year though I've been working on fixing that and I've also been working on over ten videos for this channel. I can't make any promises but I plan to post at least three more videos after this one before the end of the year. That's more videos in six months than I've posted in two years. I'm also hoping to get out at least one of my really huge projects which has been way more expensive and way more difficult than I could have ever imagined. All of this also wouldn't be possible without the support of all my patrons so I want to give a big thanks to them and I also want to say thanks to Opera for sponsoring this video. Opera's an internet browser that I've been using for a while and honestly it's the best browser that I've ever used. Not only is the whole experience super smooth and pleasant it's also full of a bunch of extra features that now I just can't imagine not having. For example they have this really useful sidebar where you can easily access things like messenger WhatsApp and even TikTok. It also lets you directly access music apps like Spotify and Apple Music and they even have a free-built in VPN service and an ad blocker. On top of this they're the first browser to go live with integrated AI tools like ChatGPT. I actually use ChatGPT all the time when researching for projects and it's been really useful to have it just right there. Besides all these features though they also offer a lot of ways to customize the browser and one simple way that I really like is with their wallpapers. They offer a huge selection to choose from and they have both animated and non-animated and the art comes from artists from all around the world and it only takes a few seconds to install it. Overall I've been having a really nice time using opera and all of the extra features but honestly I think it's worth switching over for just the sidebar alone. I definitely recommend checking it out and giving it a try and you can download it right now by clicking my link in the description. Also I've gone ahead and made a special pinboard just for this cherry soda project and a link for that can also be found in the description. That's it. As usual a big thanks goes out to all my supporters on Patreon. Everyone who supports me can see all my new videos at least 24 hours before I post them to YouTube. You'll also get access to all the older videos that I had to take down and if you support me with $5 or more you'll get your name at the end like you see here.