I’m a lazy sod. If Jane wants 10 liters of Mountain Dew from the grocery, I’ll buy it, I’ll lug it, but drink one bottle of that stuff that has to be carried, heck, no—it’s stuff that has to be carried and she doesn’t run out as soon if I abstain.
Then we got a Soda Stream. I love going outside, working up a sweat, and then coming back inside to a choice of Root Beer, Cola, you name it…and I’m a big Root Beer fan. I haven’t drunk Coke hardly at all, even with fast food, since we did away with soda fountains and you could no longer say to Charlie the soda jerk “light on the fizz, Charlie.” I mean, this is the old fashioned stuff: you can make it so fizzy it tastes like Alka Seltzer, but you don’t have to. You can make root beer that tastes like soda fountain root beer with Charlie in charge.
Just now—out to shovel a few wheelbarrows full of basalt chips, and pour them where they’re needed—then inside to make a nice half-liter of root beer, which is just fizzy enough.
And no more carrying liter bottles from the grocery. Except for Mountain Dew. Soda Stream doesn’t have a good sub for that, and Jane does like it. But Soda Stream cola is real good.
Way it works, you chill one of its special bottles, full of water, in the fridge: we keep about 6 standing in there. You take it to the Soda Stream unit, which has no electricity, just a fizzer button that shoots gas into the water. You screw the bottle onto the nozzle, press the button for fizz till it buzzes, once, twice, three times. You unscrew the bottle of fizzed water, and pour in one measure (you can adjust that, too) of syrup, diet or not. You now have the equal of bottled soda.
Because no electricity is involved, you can pack this little unit and take it on the road with you: want a coke? Unpack the unit, get some water, get some ice from the hotel icemaker, and you’ve got a soda, much as you want, no cans, no fuss. You can make a bottle or two to take on the road tomorrow, and just keep getting ice at the service stations.
I love this unit. And I get root beer.
Ah, :envy: That sounds really good. But I can’t justify another gadget right now. Maybe next year, though.
Root beer: I’m afraid I’m with Quark on root beer. For some reason, I don’t like it. Too sweet, tastes strange to me. Yet Cokes or Dr. Pepper or Mt. Dew, or Cream Soda… or occasionally Black Cherry Soda by a maker I can’t recall, good stuff. There’s also (or was) a Manzanita soda, apple flavored, maker I-dunno-who, that I had tried a few times. — I am trying to move more toward tea and juice.
Still, for good sodas, I could be strongly tempted by a gizmo.
—–
There will, however, be money in this month’s budget for a few titles from Closed Circle. 🙂
I have been writing (see Jane’s blog, recent entries) so I am (still!) not up to my former usual reading habits. But I know I’ll read titles eventually.
Something recently got me in the mood to reread some Alliance/Union novels, such as Rimrunners, Tripoint, or Merchanter’s Luck, among others. I thus discovered I need to reload my Closed Circle purchases into iBooks and the Kindle apps.
Unrelated, as far as I know, but I found “A Separate Peace” by John Knowles is ~still~ not available in ebook formats.
If you drink soda regularly, the gadget pays for itself before too long (even at inflated COâ‚‚ prices).
“inflated CO2”
Bwahaha. … OK, funnier if it was Helium, but still. :snicker:
Pressed Post too soon. I’ll look at the Soda Stream. I think I’ve seen other ppl commenting about it. If it has good alternatives, more variety, and would save me money, yippee!
Ah, and…odd, the 2 in CO2 should’ve gone subscript. Probably won’t this time either.
WordPress eats HTML <sub> tags. If you want to write “CO₂”, you need the Unicode subscript symbol. (I’ve saved a list of Unicode symbols I use for various things at ‹gist.github.com/1325295›.)
It particularly pays for itself on the road, where the drinks are pricey.
And anything that gets me to drink more fluids is good. Outside of coffee, I forget to. I grew up in an area where water tasted awful, and spent weekends where the water was not only bad-tasting, it was red and sometimes gritty. Bottled water just doesn’t do it for me.
I find most soda too sweet. When I worked fast food during college, we were allowed to drink as much soda as we wanted. After the first week, I found myself cutting it by half, or often by 2/3 with plain water. We have cut out sodas around our house in a weight-loss effort, and don’t have them any more unless we are expecting soda-drinking company. These days, I tend to indulge in hard cider rather than soda (Hornsby’s Crisp Apple cider!) or vastly diluted citrus Crystal Light.
Crystal Light has a deal with Soda Stream: they supply them the real stuff.
Gotta love the Soda Stream. Proge bought me the outfit for Christmas (one of the best presents ever!) I don’t drink soda but I do have a serious addiction to cranberry juice and fizz water. This time of year we go through it like crazy. With the amount of carbonated water we drink I think it paid for itself in about six weeks. We always exchange the empty cylinders when we buy new ones, which costs about half of what a new one costs.
Funny, but it’s not the carbonation that flips my switch about soft drinks. I’ll pour a tall glass full, and drink on it all day, so they tend to sit till the fizz is all fizzed out. I find I like them flat even better than with fizz. You can put drink powders like Crystal Light and Arizona Teas into a bottle of water, and shake it. But, they probably have that sweetener that Jane has problems with, though, don’t they. What was she saying her problem was about which sweetener?
Carbonated beverages don’t actually assuage your thirst, ya know. The carbonation just makes you think so. It’s a tromp de bouche, to coin a phrase. . .
I might also point out that a study, reported in 2006 by researchers at Tufts University in Boston, suggests that colas, specifically, might be problematic. Among the 1,413 women whose dietary records and bone-density scans they reviewed, those who drank a diet or regular cola at least three times a week over five years had significantly lower bone densities than those who sipped cola once a month or less. No such effect occurred with other carbonated drinks, even after researchers factored in intake of calcium from foods.
The likely culprit is phosphoric acid, which is unique to colas. When the body breaks down this compound, the acidity (or concentration of free hydrogen ions) of the blood increases. To neutralize acidity, hydrogen ions bind with minerals, including calcium and magnesium. If they’re not available in the blood the body draws calcium from bones.
Also studies show that when we consume calories in liquid form our bodies don’t acknowledge them the way they do those from solid food and we don’t cut our food intake later.
Just saying.
Way back when I was a paralegal and stressed to the max, I stopped drinking all fizzy drinks because I thought they were the problem with my tummy. They probably were part of it. I switched to iced tea and never went back.
I did have to learn to order “unsweet tea” when we moved to Georgia. The first time I just ordered an iced tea and took a swig of sugar, my son just laughed and laughed. Good lesson, that.
I love mine. I like to put just a little bit of something else in it, like oj, or lime juice. I’ve never done the sodas. But I used to buy seltzer by the case, now unnecessary.
Did you notice, though, the label on the bottles that says you MUST DISCARD after a certain time? I assume its plastics breaking down rather than unnecessary forced planned obsolesence.
Thanks for mentioning the bottle label. We bought ours a couple years ago after my partner developed an serious taste for Perrier. We calculated our ROI at about 3 months for the gadget and have been very happy with it. She still drinks Coke Zero and does not like their Cola. But with our water, the plain sparkled water tastes like San Pelegrino to me. I highly recommend it.
Yes, re the plastics breaking down. They’re resistent to leaching, but that doesn’t last forever.
I find bottled soft drinks ‘over-fizzed’ and unpleasant. Less so, and I’m very happy—which is also better for your bones.
Root beer ingredients: [Wikip.]”There is no standardized recipe. The primary ingredient, artificial sassafras flavoring, is complemented with other flavors. Common flavorings are vanilla, wintergreen, cherry tree bark, licorice root, sarsaparilla root, nutmeg, acacia, anise, molasses, cinnamon, clove, and honey.”
Cola ingredients: [same] ironically, the ingredient a cola doesn’t have — is cola. the primary taste of Coca-Cola comes from vanilla and cinnamon with trace amounts of orange, lime and lemon and spices such as nutmeg, plus caffeine and, in modern Coke, corn syrup. And we’re not sure about a broken down residue of coca leaves (cocaine). “The Coca-Cola Company declines to comment upon whether or not Coca-Cola contains spent coca leaves, deferring to the secret nature of the formula. Since 1929, the beverage has contained only trace amounts of cocaine alkaloids, which do not have any drug effect.”
I think root beer is probably healthier for you.
I like sassafras. I miss sassafras tea, and may take to ordering it online.
Those other root beer ingredients…. I am not sure about anise or acacia, but the one thing that I see in there that would strike me wrong, if there’s too much, in with the other flavors, is wintergreen. I like various mints, but that, in combo with the others, and the high sugary-sweet taste I get from most root beer, is probably what breaks the deal for me.
Hmm, now I may have to get a six pack of root beer to see what the heck it is that I don’t care for about it. (Yes, odd experiment, I know.) There is Barq’s, A&W, and one other brand of root beer, and those are all I can think of I’ve had in the last few years. (I try again occasionally to see if my taste has changed again.)
But I like black cherry and I like cream soda, so heheh, it balances out. — Typically, I drink Coke or Cherry Coke, Dr. Pepper, and Mr. Dew. Occasionally others as noted in earlier posts.
I’d enjoy an orange soda, if it’s not too sweet. But an occasional orange soda would be nice. (If it’s too sweet, it reminds me of Glucola, from prior blood sugar / diabetes / hypoglycemia checks. Glucola…yee-uck!)
I looked at the Soda Stream choices on Amazon, and I think I’m going to track my soda drinking (guzzling?) expenses for a while to see if/how quickly this would pay itself back. Might be easily worth it. I am down to something like 12 cans in a week, occasionally more or less, and trying to switch more to tea, juice, and milk. — I’ve never been a water drinker. Never have known why, it just isn’t how I do things. — The Soda Stream sounds like it has multiple positives, so I’ll look further.
I’m very glad to see the honey ingredient. Lately, I’ve been buying Jones Bros. root beer because it is pure cane sugar. I dislike putting too much HFCS into our bodies. So, it’s Jones or Abita (which is about twice as expensive).
I just found that whereas I can get the starter kit, unless I can find someone to refill the CO2 bottles locally, they can’t be shipped to me. I wonder if Gaspro or AirLiquide can refill them? That might be an issue for some; make sure you have a local vendor who can refill or replace the bottles for you.
Chondrite, where are you? Hilo has several: Bed, Bath, Beyond; Office Depot; we use Walmart, that being closest. http://www.sodastreamusa.com/where_to_buy.aspx
If Walmart has them, we’re good: I’m on Maui. When I looked at the SodaStream suppliers, all the listed ones were on Oahu. If you are on one of the other islands, you may be out of luck.
OK, I’m jealous. We have spent three marvelous vacations at the Ka’anapali Beach Hotel and have been sending nieces and nephews there for honeymoons, anniversaries, etc. I truly miss the smell of salt water. I really really miss my home.
Virgil’s Bavarian Nutmeg Root Beer tastes the way I remember root beer tasting when I was a child. (You and I are about the same age, CJ.) It’s expensive and hard to find. You can’t order it from Reeds website; although, you can order Virgil’s Plain Root Beer. My local Whole Foods used to carry it. They say they can’t get it any more, but the Whole Foods in Kansas City still has it. I have a niece who brings me a couple of bottles whenever she visits.
chondrite:
If you can’t get refills locally because you live in an island paradise or something, there are 3rd party adapters available that convert most sodastream models to use standard CO2 cartridges. (look on Amazon and Youtube)
(disclaimer: I haven’t tried any of those adapters, just know they exist)
DUM question #86: I’ve been able to figure out that CJ drinks coffee; what is Jane’s preferred tipple? or will she also drink the Black Drink? I have a Cunning Plan…