Okay, I did it. I bought a Soda Stream machine!!!

I did it for two reasons. One… we love soda and well, I’m really torn about the plastic bottles and the cans. Two… I don’t like all the high frutose corn syrup and all you have to have for soda. I’d like it to be a little healthier and simpler and all that jazz.

I have hunted high and low to find a good decent reason to collect 2 liter bottles. And aside from MAKE A BIRD FEEDER (good for oh, one or two of them?) or CUT AND MAKE A FUNNEL (for gosh sakes… how many funnels do you need? 2, 3 8?) And use for a YARN CADDY (again, how many yarn caddies do you need? 2? 3?) there just doesn’t seem to be a good REUSE function for these things.

Heres a great idea… I’m sure that the park wouldn’t mind if I made one of these and kept it in the yard for those times I wanna go fishing nearby…

Aside from that crazy dude in the south Pacific with his trash island made out of the things… there just isn’t a good reason to keep them and then you have to trot them in and clean them and trot them out to recycle and all that. Just didn’t seem green and sustainable to me. And it seemed that we drank a TON more of the stuff and it’s just making us more and more pudgy. We’re pudgy enough, thanks.

So then we tried cans. Yeah, they seem a little better to recycle… sorta. I learned that though they might be recycled more, they are more energy draining to make in the first place, so that’s not that good. And you still have to save them and trot them out to the recycling place. And again, aside from like making some weird adobe mud house in the desert with no zoning/building laws, most the “reuse” crafts use like one or two cans. I mean how many beer can hats does a gal need????

Of course, I’ve tried like umpteen hundred times to kick the habit and well, I just can’t. If I say no pop in the house, then we just start going to fast food more and that is expensive and worse… so I was in a real quandry… what to do! Then I stumbled onto this machine!!!! It’s SO COOL….

Sure, there is a little investment to it. The thing cost like $79. And then if you’re a smart cookie, you’ll get a starter kit, and find a coupon on line and get free shipping, etc etc…. I ended up spending about $90. Here is our first video with it… and it’s really the very first time we used it… warts and all! HAHA… I couldn’t get the bottle in there to begin with and of course, didn’t push the button down firmly enough, but still, the learning curve was not that hard.

And let me tell you… it’s good. Real good.

Very bubbly and fresh, and most of all, fun! And no more cans and bottles!

It comes with two little bottles for you to get started with. One liter sized. Perfect for the three of us. We can keep one as pop and the other as cold water ready to be pop-i-fied. Cold cold water works best… the Co2 is more readily absorbed in cold water for some reason.

We liked the lemon-lime and rootbeer flavors…. orange is okay too, but the cola… BLAH…. we threw it out!!! Honest! It was dreadful. We’re Pepsi-holics, so it would take a lot for us to accept that as a reasonable substitute. I will admit, the thing I don’t like about the Soda Stream machine is that ALL of their mixes are Splenda and Sugar based. It’s like half and half. But to me and the girls, there is still that weird diet soda aftertaste, that well, is hard to get past.

But hey, no problem! Make your own HOMEMADE syrups!!!!

We’ve been trying all sorts of things. Believe it or not… two spoons of homemade jam in a glass of carbonated water and a little swish of your spoon and you have a REALLY good flavored sweet homemade soda and the little bits of berry are fun to eat at the end!!!

We tried a fresh squeezed lemon and some simple syrup and MAN…. that was delish!!!!

I found a place online that sells JUST the soda flavors.. you can add any sweetener you want…. sugar, Splenda, whatever. So I ordered their 6 pack of popular flavors… cola, lemonline, grape, orange, rootbeer, and cream soda… each flavor bottle will make a GALLON of syrup, which would make like umpteen hundred liters of pop. It was $18 for the 6 pack. I think it will last us a year easy.

The C02 cartridges are proprietary, but they are not that expensive. LIke $30 a cartridge. Many people online say that one will last a normal daily use family of 4 about 3 – 4 months. That’s not bad at all. I’ll probably order one at the end of the month to have ready. They say, when the tank is done, it’s done. Not a lot of warning. That’s cool. I can just get into a cycle of having one in reserve, and order another when the first runs out.

And it was cool… the packaging was super simple, mostly cardboard and none of the little peanuts and excessive plastic. Nice. And it was delivered by a local guy who has a distributorship! Kinda neat. And he was very nice and said that I can just set the empty tank out on the porch and he’ll deliver the replacement just like the old milk man of old! The pop man! I love it. My Grandpa Roy was a milkman for the Meadowgold dairies in Fort Wayne, Indiana and I remember that he was very proud of it. I wish they had home milk delivery still… they don’t around here, but that would be sweet.

Anyway…. I digress. It was super simple to set up, and doesn’t need electricity or batteries or anything. The unit is a little tall, but it does fit nicely on the counter. It’s footprint is not huge, so you can tuck it in a corner or something.

They sent us a little sampler pack, that was nice. And we’ve tried a few of them so far. Half are diet drinks and well, we might save those for friends that want to try them. I might try the pink grapefruit one… cuz I think it might taste like Squirt! I love Squirt, but never really get it.

I’ve noticed too, that we’re not drinking it in huge glasses, but more as a treat and all. So that’s nice. It’s SOOOOOO bubbly… just wonderful. I want to try making a sweet tea syrup for it… that would be fun… or how about fresh squeezed lemons and simple syrup!!! We tried it with just lemon syrup and that was pretty good. I got a little bottle of fancy coffee raspberry syrup and it was good too. Not as sweet, so more like a flavored seltzer water.

WARNING WARNING WARNING>>>>>

Do NOT add sugar to the carbonated water!!!! IT WILL FOUNTAIN UP AND EXPLODE ALL OVER YOUR COUNTER and make you a sticky mess.

Don’t ask me how I know this…. just trust me… you don’t want to do it.

HAHAHAHA

Well, silliness aside…. we are LOVING this little beast. In fact, I’ve even learned that you can go to restaurant supply places and get PEPSI SYRUP!!!!! OH MY GOSH!!! I’m gonna hunt that out this week. Apparently you can get it in gallon containers and in boxes as well. I read online that a 2.5 gallon box will set you back $25. But that it will make something like 250 12 oz glasses of pop or more??? Shesh. That’s sweet. I’m going to wait for the cola flavor to show up first and see if it tastes better than the Soda Stream stuff. If not… I’m finding the REAL THING…. and then we’ll be ready for anything that comes down the pike.

www.sodastream.com

(Use the code BESTFRIENDS and you’ll get like $10 off the thing…)
www.prairiemoon.biz

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