There are two ways that we will look at - making at home for home consumption or

micro-bottling, and the second is the more industrial scale, but still small-scale bottling. Both methods are a much more manual process than the large bottlers would use, but the bar for entry is much lower. Larger scale bottling starts at around £150,000 - £200,000 and that is still very small in the bottling world. The like of the 'big boys' pump out in excess of 500,000 to a million bottles a day and the equipment costs many £millions. Let's start small.

I will assume that you understand that everything that you use must be sanitary and hygienic and how to achieve this.

The basic stages:

• The flavour base (or syrup)
• Mixing/Carbonating
• Bottling
• Preserving
• Labels, Box & Ship