Features & Benefits
The folks at Soda-Club have am interesting product that consists of a device called the home soda maker and syrups to add a variety of flavors to your home made carbonated water. How do you get home made carbonated water? The core of the Soda-Club experience is the soda maker itself. The soda maker that I was sent is called the Edition 1, you can also get a soda maker called the Fountain Jet or the Penguin. The difference between the three is mostly looks and the size of the CO2 bottle that can be used. My system used the larger Alco2Jet 110 bottle that is good for 110 one-liter bottled of soda or sparkling water.

The compressed CO2 bottle can be exchanged for new ones when empty at local dealers, or you can simp0ly order new ones online from the Soda-club website for $18.99. that works out to roughly 17 cents per liter of soft drink. You actually make the soft drinks by filling one of the two included plastic bottled with what Soda-Club calls very cold water. Once you fill the bottle and install the CO2 cylinder you are ready to secure the bottle to the soda maker and make your own tasty beverages.

Soda-Club in Use
Making the drinks is the part that my kids really liked, till I over carbonated and blew water all over them. It is recommended that you press the carbonation button on top of the machine fully, then let go till you hear three buzz sounds. Being the type to often forgo reading the instructions (like you actually read the instructions) I pressed the button and held it down. This lead to a very loud buzz (made my daughter soil herself) that then lead to a nice burst of very cold, fizzy water spraying myself and the kids. This is the point where I went back to read the instructions and found the process to be much easier than I originally made it.

While my daughter got cleaned up and cursed the soda maker as well as a 2-yr old can be expected to, I finished off making the soda by pouring the syrup into the container. This is again the point where I neglected the instructions, which I’ll blame on ADD (it’s covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act you know, so no judging me). I quickly poured the syrup into the bottle, which promptly overflowed everywhere. The only good part about this little incident was that my daughter didn’t get messy again, the bad part was that I did get my son again the second time around and now I am apparently grounded till he is 30.

After these little setbacks I decided to stop and read the instructions fully, which helped quite a bit the second time around. No messes at all and the entire process took all of 5 minutes. Soda-Club sent me a variety of soft drink syrups to try out. The root beer and cola flavors were pretty good, while I still prefer my brand name soda flavor, the kids loved them. My favorite was the energy drink which had a very good flavor to it. I also found the fruit flavored drinks like cranberry raspberry and orange mango tasted great, as did the kids. The bottles of syrup last a long time too, with each bottle able to make 12 liters of soda. Diet flavors are available that are sweetened with Splenda.

The biggest problem for fans of name brand sodas is that once you develop a taste for the name brand flavors, it can be hard to go to more generic alternatives. Let’s just get this out of the way, the flavors Soda-Club offer naturally taste similar to the name brand counterparts, but not identical. The Soda-Club cola tastes good, but it’s not the same as Coke so if you go into this thinking that the flavors are going to taste just like your brand name favorites you might be disappointed. However, go into the Soda-Club thinking you can have some fun with the kids making home made sodas that taste good in their own right and save some cash along with trips to the store, you will be very happy.