Let the over-indulgence in club soda begin

Earlier this summer, while Neil and I were busy shopping at the Birch Run, Michigan outlet mall, we ran across some energy drink concentrate. While the product was clearly intended to be sold as part of a carbonated water beverage system we decided that we could just buy the concentrated syrup and try mixing it with store-bought club soda. Nonetheless, we were both somewhat taken with the idea of homemade carbonated water based drinks, something that was a relatively large part of our childhood.

Last night, almost a month after our trip to the outlet mall, I came home to find that a SodaStream home carbonating machine had been purchased for our apartment. As you might expect, I was quite excited by this turn of events. When I looked in the fridge I discovered two new bottles. It looked like one was filled with home-made energy drink. It looked like the other was about a half liter of club soda. As I didn't know exactly what was going on at the time I left both of these bottles un-sampled.

This morning I finally got a chance to get the run-down on the new acquisition. Apparently, this was purchased as a gift for Neil for his birthday (which, in retrospect, makes a great deal of sense). I was also given a quick run-down on the operation of the machine, which is pretty straight forward. The only bad news was that the energy drink concentrate that we purchased in the US, even though it is from the same company, is not available in Canada yet (we are wondering if we can order it from the US site?).

Anyway, since the acquisition of the machine last night we have really be going through quite a bit of carbonated water, though no more than we would if we had 60 liters of club soda on the kitchen floor. For those of you who are curious, we have consumed at least one (though maybe two) liter of energy drink, one liter of grapefruit pop, and at least three liters of club soda. While I don't imagine that we will be able to keep this pace up forever, I do suspect that as big consumers of fluids that we will be able to maintain a relatively steady pace over the coming days, weeks, and months.

For those of you who are interested, Wikipedia has a neat article outlining SodaStream's somewhat surprising history.