Soda Club Soda Maker - Edition 1 Home Soda Maker Review

For better or worse, I drink a lot of liquids from water to tea to soda. Unfortunately, I'm getting older and I just can't survive on pure sugar any longer. I've tried switching wholesale to tea/coffee/water, but I get bored a little too easily and end up craving a soda here and there. I'm also not a big fan of diet-tasting drinks. Enter sodaclub.

With the Home Soda Maker, you are combining cold water, carbonation, and syrup much like a fountain soda machine. The unit itself houses the carbonation unit, and nothing else. When you are ready to make your soda, you fill one of the bottles with cold tap water, screw it into the machine and hit the button on the top of the machine to inject the bubbles. The fizziness depends on how many times you hit the button and varies from pretty flat to ludicrous. Next, you unscrew the bottle, then add the syrup very slowly, close the bottle, and roll it around a bit to help it mix. Now you can choose to either chill the soda further in your fridge, drink it straight, or throw some ice on it.

The machine itself is made almost entirely of plastic, but it is well constructed. The cover for the back is a bit awkward to replace after installing the carbonation canister, but not overtly so. The bottles are made from the same plastic as most of the mountain-climber styled water bottles, so they're practically indestructible. Which leads to my only real flaw, you can run over them with a tank, but you can't put them in the dishwasher. To sodaclub's credit, there is a different model that uses glass bottles, which you can put in the dishwasher. But, it's a more expensive unit, and I don't own it.

Cost-wise the soda will run you right around name-brand soda when it's on sale.  You're not going to save a boatload of money with this product, but you will save a boatload of space in your trashcan since you won't be tossing out any 2-liters or aluminum cans.  Since I live on the third floor and don't like taking the trash out, this is a big boon for me. 

As I mentioned above, I'm a sucralose, saccharin, Nutrasweet, etc hater.  Syrup from sodaclub comes in regular and diet varieties.  Diet uses Splenda, and I haven't tried any of those flavors but I hear they are pretty good.  Regular is a bit of a misnomer as it's half sugar and half Splenda, and had I known that ahead of time I probably wouldn't have tried it.  However, I didn't and it tastes pretty normal so maybe there's some magic ratio where there's enough sugar to keep it from tasting diet-ey.  I will say the cola flavors do tend to hint at the Splenda a bit more than the citrus style flavors do.

So what's it taste like?  There are a ton of flavors and I haven't had a one that tastes bad.  I'm not a big fan of the cola's just because I drink a lot of coke and it's more a Pepsi taste.  The Dr Pepper clone is more like vanilla cola, but it's good.  I prefer the Mountain Dew clone to the real thing as it's not as sweet.  The root beer is another favorite of mine.  And I LOVE, the orange flavor.  It tastes exactly like it should.  It is interesting that some folks are mixing syrups to create new flavors, like dreamsicle, so there's definitely some room to tinker.

All in all, I'd definitely recommend this to anyone that likes to drink a lot of soda.  I've learned to enjoy cutting out some calories, maybe saved a little cash in the long run, and I'm saving the environment.