SodaStream Fountain Jet Seltzer and Soda Maker

Confession time. I can’t stand drinking plain water. Unless I am dehydrated and nearly dying of thirst after a long hike or tough workout, I will avoid plain water even more vigorously than I try and avoid the flu or bubonic plague. Seriously. I hate it. Bottled, tap, spring, mineral, filtered, or distilled, I find it repulsive and disgusting. I have since I was a kid. No idea why, but I hate it.

So, in an effort to injest something healthy (because left to my own devices I’d simply drink three or four liters of Coke a day) I long ago developed a liking for sparkling water. Call it sparkling water, seltzer, or club soda, I can happily drink carbonated water by the gallon. Don’t try to understand it. I’m just weird that way.

Old Fashioned Siphon Bottle

I am old enough to remember getting soda delivered to the house in big wooden cases filled with the old-style siphon seltzer bottles like you still see in cartoons and Three Stooges movies. Some were blue, others clear, a few green, but I remember them all being heavy, and they were all carbonated like you wouldn’t believe. This memory was brought back recently when the New York Times Magazine wrote an article on one of the last seltzer delivery men in Brooklyn, NY. The owner of the factory that still refilled the bottles had this to say:

“It cleans your tongue in the morning,” Mr. Bernstein said of Mr. Beberman’s seltzer. “It’s like coffee without the caffeine. You drink it ice-cold and it shocks the senses.”

(“Real seltzer should hurt,” said Mr. Gomberg, the factory owner.)

Anyway, for the last decade or so I’ve been buying seltzer in bottles and cans so I can drink something besides soda all the time. And after a while this gets to be a pain. Where I live in Massachusetts there’s a five cent bottle deposit and I begin to feel like an idiot if I just recycle the bottles without trying to at least get some of my money back. So every couple of weeks I schlep down to the supermarket with several big bags of empties and feed them into the return machine, all for my $1.50. Hardly seems worth the effort.

So – I got very excited last spring when I saw an ad for the Soda Stream system which promised to let me make my own seltzer at home.

What You Get

Starter Kit

I ordered a Fountain Jet Starter Kit (currently listed for $99.95, but I’m pretty sure they had it on sale for $79.99). This comes with a basic carbonating machine, one CO₂ cylinder, and two one-liter bottles. My offer also shipped with a selection of soda flavors (both regular and diet) and two sparkling water flavors. That’s the hook with this system, you can make almost any sparkling soda with it, from plain, to may flavors of regular and diet. SodaStream makes many different syrups that you can add to a bottle to turn it into something approximating your favorite soda, and if you’re not too particular about soda flavors then this might be a good choice.

Benefits

SodaStream touts all kinds of benefits on their website, including how it can be more economical to make your own soda, how it’s more environmentally friendly, and how it can be relatively better if you control what goes into the soda. But I didn’t buy this system for any of these reasons, though the environmental one appealed to me. No, I bought it because I am lazy and I was getting sick and tired of having to go to the store to buy a bunch of seltzer and then take the empty bottles back every couple of weeks only to have to do it again. And I still occasionally ran out when I was thirsty at home. So for me this wasn’t about money — it was about convenience.

How Does it Work?

Bottom line – it works just as advertised. Their directions are:

1. Fill the 1-liter bottles with water to a fill mark and chill them (because you can dissolve more gas in cold liquids than in warm liquids).
2. Screw the bottle onto the carbonator.
3. Press the button three or more times depending on your carbonation preference.

That’s it. And it really is that simple. The carbonator requires no electricity other power. The pressure of the gas cylinder is all the power needed. Just screw the cylinder on the back and carbonate away.

The Verdict

Having used it for more than six months I can say that it works as advertised. And I don’t run out of seltzer any more. I only tried one of the soda mixes (orange) and it was OK. It tasted about like every other orange soda I’ve tried. But when it comes to cold clean seltzer, I can now have as much as I want when I want it and I don’t have to return any stupid bottles. So – mission accomplished for me.

One Disclaimer

I like my SodaStream a lot. But I am also fortunate to live somewhere where I have my own well and the water that comes up is pure and good tasting and all I need to do is fill the bottle and carbonate it. The SodaStream isn’t going to fix bad water, so if you live in some city where the stuff coming out of your tap smells like pool water, then you’ll need to take that into account. If cost is an issue you’ll need to factor in the cost of filtering bad water, which isn’t trivial.

In a Rush for Seltzer

I rarely have the forethought to chill some bottles of water in preparation for carbonation. So I have developed a method for making seltzer without the wait. I simply fill the bottles with up to 1/3 crushed ice from my kitchen ice maker and water to the top. With a few shakes and stirs the ice usually dissolves in a matter of minutes and the water is “ice cold.” Works fine for me, even if a few stray pieces haven’t melted by the time I carbonate.

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