Hacker News: peaxkl

New comment by peaxkl in "DIY Soft Drinks"

peaxkl — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:12:51 +0000

I would say drinking it cold, carbonated, with caramelized sugar and lemon juice, out of a bottle instead of brewed as a tea from a calabaza.

New comment by peaxkl in "DIY Soft Drinks"

peaxkl — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 08:04:05 +0000

That's my approach to recreate a soft drink (ClubMate), like OP is trying to recreate Coke (etc.). Would love to also learn something about the traditional recipe

New comment by peaxkl in "DIY Soft Drinks"

peaxkl — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:59:45 +0000

Thanks for the tips! Will try!

New comment by peaxkl in "DIY Soft Drinks"

peaxkl — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 21:19:27 +0000

For me using the cold brew method instead of cooking the leaves had the biggest effect on the bitterness.

The taste goes in the direction of ClubMate, but has a stronger tea taste than the original ClubMate. I think reasons for that are the reduced amount of sugar and the fact that ClubMate uses natural flavor in their tea extract.

New comment by peaxkl in "DIY Soft Drinks"

peaxkl — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 21:04:55 +0000

I recently started getting into homemade ClubMate production. The goal was to create a drink that has caffeine, less sugar than regular mate and is still tasty.

It took me 4-5 tries to get to a recipe that tastes good. Earlier tries involved cooking the mate, which led to a bitter taste. Cold brewing led to way better results.

Here is my current recipe for 5 bottles (á 0,5l):

  - 60g mate tea leaves (coarse) [1]
  - 500ml water
  - 65g cane sugar
  - 1 squeezed lemon
  - soda water

  1. Add 60g of mate to a 500ml bottle and fill up the rest with water
  2. Let it sit in the fridge for 12-24h
  3. Then strain the mate from the liquid
  4. Use a filter cloth or a tea towel (soak with water first)   to filter out the remaining suspended solids
  5. Put sugar and the lemon juice together into a pot and start caramelizing the sugar
  6. Then add the filtered mate tea and take the pot from the stove
  7. Now distribute it equally on the 5 bottles and fill up the rest with soda

The mate tastes less sweet than the original mate, but is still a great drink to keep you awake.

[1] Mate tea that I'm using: https://www.amazon.com/Playadito-Traditional-Colonia-Liebig-...

New comment by peaxkl in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)"

peaxkl — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:05:59 +0000

Currently working on the first helpcenter that writes itself.

The tool makes it super easy to create help articles in any language, just by clicking through a process. The first results are super promising!

https://happysupport.ai/en

New comment by peaxkl in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)"

peaxkl — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 16:30:24 +0000

I’m working on a help center that keeps itself up-to-date - https://happysupport.ai (landing page is German, product is English)

Creating and maintaining an up-to-date help center is a huge hassle. In many companies there is no one that really feels obligated to take care of it.

We want to optimize this process:

- Creation: Just click through your process. We take a screenshot on every click and generate a full written article with screenshots and a GIF. You can also talk while recording to add additional context.

- Maintenance: Connect to your tools (GitHub, Asana, Slack, …) and we automatically suggest changes to your docs if your product changes.

- Consumption: Users can consume the content as they like: Read the docs themselves or ask a Q&A bot.

At the moment the creation and consumption parts are already working well. Now I’m working on the maintenance part.