SodaClub.com Home Soda Maker Review
About a month ago my family and I took a trip to Jungle Jims (a huge supermarket on the north side of Cincinnati) to get a few items. I know this is a weird starting point for a soda machine review, but bear with me for a minute.
One of the things that I wanted to pick up was a few different kinds of diet soda. Since starting Adkins my choices in beverage have been limited to either brand name diet soda (Coke, Sprite, Mt Dew), Crystal Light, or Water(tm). Jungle Jims has a huge section of imported or specialty soda and was the perfect for me to find an alternative to the corporate soda machine.
After checking what seemed like 100 bottle labels for carb content I finally settled on an off brand diet black cherry soda and an off brand grape soda. I bought a 6 pack of both and it ended up costing me around 10 dollars total. A small price to pay for something different, or at least I though.
I preceded to down those 12 sodas in about 3 days. I admit, I was holding back. The soda addiction that my wife and I had was getting to be an expensive habit and now instead of being satisfied with the “regular stuff” we moved on to the “china white” of soda.
Enter Guy Gilbery.
In 1903, Guy Gilbey developed a system for carbonating beverages at home. His Sodastream device was primarily marketed to British consumers but quickly became popular among most of Europe. Flash forward 106 years, the Sodastream (marketed under the name Soda Club) is steadily gaining popularity in the United States.
The Sodastream is basically a machine that injects cold tap (or bottled) water with CO2. This process takes about 10 seconds and makes 1 liter of carbonated water at a time. After carbonating the water you can add flavored syrups. The machine takes CO2 cylinders that you are suppose to exchange with Soda Club after they are empty. They say a cylinder lasts about 60 liters. The concentrated soda flavoring makes about 12 liters per bottle.
I ordered online from Sodaclub.com on January 13th after business hours. My order arrived on January 22nd, about 9 business days later.
My order contained the following:
1 Fountain Jet Machine
3 Cylinders of C02 – Makes upto 180 liters.
4 Carbonating Bottles – 1 liter each.
8 SodaMix Syrups – Makes 96 liters of soda.
The order came to around $170 dollars with shipping and tax. They even included a sampler pack so that we could try all the flavors that we didn’t order.
The Fountain Jet was very easy to setup. The CO2 cylinder screwed right into place and within probably 10 minutes I was able to make soda.
The first flavor I tried to make was Diet Cream Soda. It tasted flat and too sweet. The first mistake I made was using cold water from the tap instead of chilling it in the refrigerator. Carbonation works MUCH better with chilled water. Second mistake I made was adding too much syrup. I added an entire cap full. While this works really well on some flavors, cream soda was not one of them.
My second attempt at making my own soda was with Diet Cola. This time I waited until the water was super chilled before carbonating and it worked perfectly. My wife said it was a good alternative to Diet Coke, but wasn’t dead on. All of the Sodamix flavors use Splenda, so the taste is different when compared to normal soda. It takes some time to get used to it.
For the next week we tried all the diet flavors Soda Club had to offer. No longer would we need to carry 12 packs or 2-liters of soda home, and we had cut our trash down dramatically.
Even though I really like the Soda Club machine it does have its drawbacks.
Ecofriendly? Sorta. If you count the fuel UPS (or whatever shipping vendor they use) uses to get you the CO2 and Sodamix refills each way it is probably not that environmentally friendly. Better for the environment than throwing out plastic from 2liter bottles but not a cure all.
The normal amount of “buzzes” (sound indicating your soda is carbonated) that SodaClub recommends for normal carbonation is five. We found that five buzzes just doesn’t cut it. After leaving an empty glass of soda out for around 15 minutes it was flat. We found that for us, 8-10 buzzes is just right. One cylinder of CO2 lasted about a week for us since we ‘over carbonate’ our soda. I know for a fact that we didn’t drink 60 liters of soda. We are currently on our second cylinder of CO2 and this time we are counting the number of liters used. Luckily we have found a few hacks that make Soda Club more cost effective and ecofriendly.
SodaStream / Soda Club Hacks
1) Getting real Diet Coke or your soda of choice.
One of the other drawbacks of Soda Club is that you are suppose to use their Sodamix syrups. My wife can stand the Soda Club mixes but prefers Diet Coke.
Most of the time you need a Coke or Pepsi corporate account to obtain postmix syrups that are used in fountain machines. We found a local GFS Marketplace that sells Coke syrups in 5 gallon bags. These are the same bag in box syrups that restaurants all over the country use. It was $60 and I had a $10 off coupon. I also had to say that I was a local restaurant and give their name. $50 later and I had 5 gallons of syrup to my wife’s delight. We split the syrup up into 1 gallon jugs (previously used for water) and have enough syrup now to make about 80 liters of Diet Coke. We add about 1 cup of syrup per liter of soda.
2) Refill your proprietary SodaClub cylinders.
You can find adapters online (ebay or a google search) that will allow you to refill your SodaClub cylinders using a 50lb siphon donor C02 tank. Prices on donor tags normally involve a refundable deposit (50-60 dollars), a monthly rental fee ($5-10) , and a refill fee ($20-$30). The adapter runs about $100 plus shipping. From what I have read a normal household of 4 uses about 50lbs of CO2 per year. So refilling your tanks could save a bunch in the long run. They also have adapters to retrofit a paintball gun CO2 tank. This may be a better option for those people who do not want to violate the SodaClub CO2 cylinder terms of service.
Final Thoughts:
The SodaClub Home Soda Maker is a great alternative to store bought soda. This product is probably not the most cost effective option if you use Soda Club to exchange the cylinders and provide the syrup, but if you count the time and effort it takes to lug a 12 pack of soda home I think it is a great deal.
