How long a dirty soda stays fizzy
Long enough to drink it and not much longer. The window is set by three things, and two of them are the ice.
Carbonation is dissolved gas held in the liquid by pressure and by cold. Open the bottle and the pressure is gone, so the only thing still holding it in is temperature — and a cup packed with ice is, counter-intuitively, a machine for getting rid of it.
The three things spending your fizz
1. Temperature, before you even pour
CO₂ solubility follows Henry's law and falls off a cliff as the liquid warms. Pouring room-temperature soda instead of fridge-cold throws away around 40% of the carbonation before the drink is even built. This is the single biggest one, and it happens before the ice is involved.
2. Nucleation — the ice's surface
A bubble cannot form in open liquid; it needs a rough site to grow on. Ice is covered in them, and the smaller you break it the more there are. On this app's model, nugget ice knocks CO₂ out about 2.2× as fast as a plain cube and crushed about 2.9×. Pouring soda through open air onto that surface is the worst case, which is why every build step here says to tilt the cup and run it down the inside wall.
3. Melt
Melt does not remove carbonation directly — it dilutes everything else. Ten minutes into a nugget build a fifth of what is in the cup is melt water, and the sugar-acid balance has moved somewhere you did not ask for. The drink goes flat and watery on roughly the same clock.
The window, per build
Every recipe on this site carries a drink-by figure. It is computed from the base's carbonation, the ice style's nucleation and melt rate, and the cup size — it is the point where the build drops below 60% of its starting fizz.
| Build | Ice | Drink within |
|---|---|---|
| The classic dirty Dr Pepper | Nugget / pebble | 13 min |
| Dairy-free dirty soda | Nugget / pebble | 13 min |
| Sugar-free dirty soda | Nugget / pebble | 13 min |
| Coconut cream dirty soda | Nugget / pebble | 13 min |
| Sour dirty soda | Nugget / pebble | 13 min |
| Dessert dirty soda | Nugget / pebble | 12 min |
| Low-calorie dirty soda | Nugget / pebble | 13 min |
| Tropical dirty soda | Nugget / pebble | 13 min |
How to stretch it
- Colder Fridge-cold soda, 38 °F / 4 °C. Not "cool".
- Pour down the wall Fewer nucleation sites than open air.
- Do not stir Stirring is nucleation you are doing on purpose. Build in the order that mixes itself: dense syrups first, soda over them.
- Bigger ice A big rock fills less of the cup and melts at under half a cube's rate. It is the sipping choice.
- Straw to the bottom The syrup that did not mix is down there.
None of it makes the drink keep. Dirty soda is not a sipping drink — the recipe is only true for a little while, which is why the app prints the number instead of pretending otherwise.