Make Your Own Soda

2007-06-10 21:30 - General

According to my del.icio.us account (where I bookmarked it), I found out about Soda Club about two months ago. The idea is that you buy a little machine, CO2 canisters, and flavor syrups and make soda yourself, for cheap. The idea interests me because I drink a fair deal of soda, but one of the downsides of living in New York and not having a car is that I basically have to carry all my groceries. Being 99% water, it seems silly to carry soda around.

Their cheapest machine is $90 for a combo kit. The CO2 canisters cost $20, and are claimed to last for 110 liters. The flavor syrups cost an average of $4, for 12 liters each. The end result? Buying just the combo pack, and assuming free water to put in it. Shipping is much harder to estimate, so for this best-case scenario, it's been ignored.

'Round here, the easiest soda to get at the store are the 1.5 liter bottles, very often on sale for $1 a piece. This means $0.67/liter. This is the price to beat. Factoring in the cost of the machine, the first 60 liters (using up the flavor in the starter kit) costs $1.57/liter. You've got to run through 15 more flavor bottles to make a total of 228 liters of soda to get the cost down to $0.66/liter.

I just finally did the exact math for this post, but I knew instinctively how much a $70 layout hurts defraying the cost of a $1 product, so it was always just intriguing instead of exciting. On the other hand, I don't have to buy their machine. Maybe I can just use them as a source for interesting flavors...

It was with that thought that I purchased a bottle of seltzer water this past weekend. I tried putting some Kool-Aid mix into it, because I already had it handy, and I found out how close a liter is to a quart, making the standard ratios easy to mix. It didn't work so well. Like a Mentos, the powder of the mix did a great job liberating the dissolved gas from the water, leaving a very flat drink. I might have to try it again later, with a preparation step of using just a bit of the water to turn the powder into a sort of syrup.

Of course, on the other hand, this is already starting to get harder than just carrying a bottle of soda home so, what's the point?

Comments:

here here!
2007-06-11 21:14 - killdeer

the soda ,or "pop" as we call it in Canada, is easier to buy then to make yourself; cheaper too.

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