Yes, you can make your own soda.

by -TheBestMoms

Let me be brutally honest…I have a soda problem. By soda problem I mean that I have not written a grocery list in the past 10 years that did not specifically say “Soda”…even when I had plenty in the pantry. It all started when my mom would buy Diet Coke when I was a kid, and it was her treat. We kids we supposed to drink water or milk(which I still don’t drink), even Kool Aid, but never mom’s Diet Cokes. I would often come home after school and open the back of the 12 pack box of Diet Coke and sneak one all for myself before she came home from work and when she got home, not a soda was missing from what she could see. Skillz.

I have been known to send the Mr. to the store on a soda run in the middle of the night because it is just that serious to me. He’ll happily tell you that I’m not doing that anymore. The people over at Soda Stream USA sent us a fountain jet and all of the soda flavors that we would need to give the Soda Stream a try. At first, I was a little intimidated because it does have the pressurized carbonators and I didn’t want to, well, blow up-as usual, an over reaction on my part. Then I flipped over the machine looking for a plug and couldn’t find any so I finally decided to read the instructions. It turned out to be very simple to click in the carbonator and go-no plug, no batteries.

Now for the embarrassing part of my story…
After getting it set up (and once you get yours and see just how simple it is to set up, you’ll say that I should have labeled my last paragraph as embarrassing as well), I threw my instructions aside-how difficult can it be from this point, right? I stuck the soda stream bottle, filled to the fill line with tap water, right up under the carbonator, pressed the button and got sprayed like a clown in a circus! My kids LOVED it! It turns out that you are supposed to screw the bottle in (its way simpler than it sounds) not just hold it there, while you shoot carbonation into it. After drying off and doing it the right way, we had soda!

Now, I’m a soda snob-true story-and I was worried that it wouldn’t be bubbly or that the flavors would be ‘just okay’ but I was pleasantly surprised. The sodas were very good and you would have never guessed they were made with tap water. Now that I have used it for the past month, making soda has become second nature and it only takes a minute to do. The kids love watching me make the soda and they take turns picking their flavors. We have even had a get together recently and used the soda stream to make mixers for our cocktails-super convenient because who wants to run back to the store mid-get-together? And because the soda stream doesn’t need electricity, we plan on taking it to the beach and camping this spring.

Do we still buy sodas? Yes-not as many though. That may very well change if they ever come out with a Cherry Coke Zero flavor for the machine! Oh, and one last thing, for you energy drinkers-they also have a sodamix for energy drinks that taste-I kid you not-just like Red Bull and according to their web site, it costs about $0.20 per serving, not $2. Give it a try-we did, we were skeptical, and we were pleasantly surprised.

Check out their web site to learn more and to learn about the green aspects of the sodastream and see how soda stream stacks up against the national soda brands in calories, sodium, carbs and sugar-something to think about.

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TheBestMoms.com was provided a soda stream unit and an assortment of sodamix flavors for the purpose of reviewing the product(s). TheBestMoms.com was not compensated for, nor influenced in writing this review.