soda club ?'s

[scottyt]

okay bought one at boaters world, the stuff is not bad and i can see a reason for it on the boat. but my question is has anyone tried the regular soda syrups (coke or pepsi or what ever ) with a soda stream/soda club maker not just their stuff?

as a soda drinker i think i like this thing

[sailingdog]

Should work fine... after all, all you're doing is diluting it and adding carbonation... The one thing that might be a problem is the dilution ratios might be different.

[eryka]

We've had a Soda Club on the boat for a couple of years now, and love love love it! We're not soda drinkers, we flavor ours with just a bit of ginger and honey, so can't help you there. The machine's instructions also agree with S'dog, you can use anything for flavor as long as you add it *after* carbonating the plain water. Then half the fun is tweaking the proportions to get it to taste exactly like you enjoy.

On a related note, with Boaters World going out of business, how do you get refills? Are these just standard CO2 cylinders? I assume food-grade will be different than industrial grade!

[sailingdog]

Eryka—

Sodaclub.com has on-line ordering for supplies IIRC.

One thing that might be nice to try to flavor the carbonated water is Crystal Light... Their lemonade and other flavors might be really nice with some carbonation. Low calorie too..and the powder form is less messy than liquid concentrates in many ways.

[scottyt]

yes they do have online ordeing, but there is another store near me called william sanoma that sell it too.

as for standard brands i figured it would work i was just wondering if any one had tried it

[Greenflash35]

We just add some homemade orange extract to the soda for a tasty, non-calorie soda. Since Boaters World is going out of business maybe we should all start calling West Marine to ask them to start carrying the Soda Makers so we crusers without easy mailing addresses can buy them.

[patrickrea]

The ratio for Pepsi brand product is 5:1, Coke based products are (or at least were) 2:1. The hard part is getting a hold of the syrup.

[scottyt]

patrick, sams club sells the syrup, but in 5 gallon boxes ( i think its 5 gallon ). that would last a long time. it would not be so bad if you could get 5 boats to split it up, a gallon would cost about 10 bucks.

good idea on the trying to get west to carry it