Problem: We try to avoid pop here, both for the sugar and the caffeine. Juice has a lot of sugar and calories, too, so we try to drink water. Staying hydrated is useful to your health. The problem is that water is mostly boring. We find we just don’t drink enough of it.
Solution: Get club soda. Club soda is just plain carbonated water, but it’s amazing what a difference it makes. Ice cold, it’s much more refreshing than water, and we’re far more likely to drink it.
Problem: Club soda in a 2 liter bottle goes flat before it’s finished, and club soda in cans means we toss 18 or 24 cans a week. Not very environmentally friendly, even if they are recycled. So, what to do?
Solution: SodaStream. It’s a soda water machine, made and sold by a Winnipeg company.
A friend has one and Jenn and the kids tried it out. They were so impressed that we went out looking for one that night. Sears sells them in the kitchen appliances section, in a kit that comes with the maker, two plastic soda bottles and a CO2 canister. Put the CO2 canister in the machine, add cold tap water to the bottle, attach it to the machine, pull the lever, and faster than you can say PSHHHHHHHT! you have a bottle of club soda.
They also sell concentrated syrups that you can add to the bottle of water to make cola, diet cola, ginger ale, or a bunch of other flavours. We tried fruit and ginger ale and they were both great.
The machine comes in a number of different styles, but the only difference we could see was essentially fashion. There’s plain plastic, stainless steel and one that’s modernly penguin-shaped. We bought the stainless one because the mechanism for attaching the canister seemed more robust than the cheaper plain plastic one.
The canisters are about $20 each (we bought a spare) and they lasted us about two weeks of constant use (so a month each in a normal family…) which is similar to what we were spending on club soda, but with no garbage to throw out.
You take the canisters back to the store to be refilled and you get a deposit back, or money off your next canister.
Not too long ago I would have laughed at the suggestion of a soda pop machine in our kitchen, but it saves us money and it’s far greener than what we used to drink. Even if you drink pop, the cost of the syrups still make the SodaStream cheaper than buying 2 liters, and there’s less environmental impact.
