I saw one of these Soda Club machines where you make your own soda at the State Fair last year and had a hard time getting it off my mind ever since. Needless to say, now that I've got my hands on one, I'm like a kid in a soda store. I love drinking soda of all sorts, and really dig being able to make club and flavored carbonated drinks at home.

It's a pretty simple design and it's fairly easy to use, once you can curb your enthusiasm to avoid following the instructions. You're only supposed to carbonate water in it, but I thought for sure using wine to make my own spritzer wouldn't be any trouble. I learned the hard way after turning my kitchen into a set piece for The Shining that the instructions were written for a reason.

I like to drink club soda a lot, and that's the easiest way to use the machine. I find it best to keep a pre-filled bottle of cold water in the fridge, then just carbonate it when you're ready for some.

So how is the soda? I thought the root beer, cola, and diet cola flavors were pretty good. The diet grapefruit had a strange peppery taste to it. I was a bit disappointed to see that they use an artificial sweetener (sucralose) in the non diet sodas. In addition, they have high fructose corn syrup instead of pure sugar, but you're pretty much going to get that with any commercial soda you buy these days, anyway. It'd just be nice to have the homemade stuff a bit more pure.

The folks at Soda Club are marketing this is a nice green alternative to save on the amount of waste that shipping individual sodas around creates. From that aspect, they're dead on. The bottles it comes with are easily rinsed out and used again, and aside from the bottles of syrup, you're really not creating too much waste with the product. I imagine if these get more popular, there could be some underground recipes for making your own flavored syrups at home.

It'd also be nice if there was a way to refill the tank from a local gas provider instead of having them ship a new one to you. The process seems a bit cumbersome, as you have to leave the empty bottle outside your door so they can swap it with the new one when it arrives. I would imagine a bad neighborhood with recycle-crazy hobos, or an apartment where the packages come to a central location would make this a bit more difficult to pull off. A refill replacement in this fashion will cost $27.98 shipped (though they currently have a promotion where you can get just get a new bottle of gas shipped for the same price as the "swap" deal). This makes your cost per liter of drinks about 25 cents. The syrups typically run in the $4-$5 range, so in all, it's still more economical than buying non discounted sodas.

It's also a product of convenience. It's perfect for the casual soda drinker who doesn't guzzle down a 12 pack a day. It's also a good space saver to have a lot of potential sodas ready to go, and just making them at will.

You can currently pick up the set pictured above for $79.99 plus shipping, and it looks like there's order locations worldwide, so there's a lot of flexibility there. You can CLICK HERE to buy one or find out more.

-Robert Berry

rberry@retrocrush.com