This site is all about the re-discovered world of SodaStream. I love my new SodaStream and wanted to share my thoughts on the product range, flavours, tips and ideas with others. I’ll add to this site over the coming weeks. Get involved by leaving your comments and let me know what you think about your SodaStream!
The best SodaStream Flavours
Having reviewed a number of the official SodaStream flavour range I thought it was high time I put together a top ten based on the delectable bunch of flavours I’ve drunk so far. This top ten will no doubt change as I try even more, so I will come back and edit this post down the line. For now… here are the best SodaStream flavours in the land.
Read more »
Official Pink Grapefruit Flavour
There’s few things in life better than waking from a big night out to gorge yourself on rashers of bacon, egg, sausage, potato waffle, beans, grilled tomatoes, a fried slice and then either a glass of ice cold grapefruit juice, or even better, a fresh grapefruit, the edge taken off with a scattering of sugar. Grapefruit is bitter, but also flavoursome and it has the power to burn through a hangover with cleansing acidity, leaving you feeling like you can put your shoes on and leave the house.
As for fizzy grapefruit… well, I have to admit I don’t think I have any experience of that. I am casting my mind back, but… no, I can’t remember ever drinking it before, but hey, there’s a first time for everything and well, as a big fan of grapefruit juice, surely adding carbonation is a workable concept? Read more »
Official Apple Flavour
Apple is a refreshing fruit and a staple flavour of the drinks world. Refreshing and admired in drinks from the purest of pure juices through to the fizziest of Tango Apple flavours, only the evil forces of Cider, a truly disgusting beverage sour and sully the apple’s reputation.
Fizzy apple drinks of the non-alcoholic variety generally acquit themselves well. The king of apple drinks, Appletiser lays waste to all in its way, the most premium of pub soft-drinks brand, guaranteed to taste like rain from heaven on a boiling hot day in a part-shaded pub garden. Glistening off the shelf in Sainsbury’s, tempting those of stout wallet with offers of 3 for the price of 2.
Moving down to the pot noodle level, Tango Apple has always been a favourite since it first began refreshing school kids in the North West London area circa 1992. Deadly sweet, but with enough animal fizziness to triumph over lesser concoctions like Oasis every single day. Even Lucozade Apple, though artificial enough to build a block of pre-fabricated flats and containing enough sugar to build a sculpture gets some respect for having the determination to be quite so toxic. Read more »
Official Red Berry Mix Flavour
Red Berry Mix. The title alone intrigued me. What were these red berries they were speaking of and in what proportion had they been mixed?
I’m a big fan of the berry. On cereal, crushed and put in a smoothy, pulped and in juice or au naturale, plucked from a prickly bush and eaten while on a lonely walk, the berry has style. Sweet, sharp, blessed of bulbous protuberances, high liquid content and distinctive taste, berries are beloved of the flavour maker. Read more »
New flavours to try
A big day today at Sodastream HQ with the arrival of a whole load of as yet untried flavours. No doubt some reviews to follow shortly. Prospect of root beer almost too good to be true.
Official Cranberry & Raspberry Flavour
After my experience with another flavour in the SodaStream ‘Clear’ range, Passion and Mango flavour, I was fully prepared to be underwhelmed by Cranberry & Raspberry Flavour. Drinking a flavoured drink that has no flavour is like driving a car that has no wheels. With one you won’t get very far and the neighbours will laugh at you. With the other you will wish you had saved some money and just drunk some water.
Well ok, those two things are not very alike really, but moving onto more relevant matters, is Cranberry & Raspberry flavour similarly pointless to its passion and mango cousin? The answer to that is ‘yes and no’. Read more »
Official Ginger Ale Flavour
Ginger is one of a few naturally occurring phenomenon like liquorice, aniseed and marmite (well ok, that’s not natural) that has a taste totally unique to itself. A miracle of weirdness – spicy, sweet, sharp, sour and crazy all in one freakish root vegetable. Capable of turning the bland into the exciting, the insipid to the downright overpowering, ginger is definitely one of my favourite super foods. Wikipedia explains: “The characteristic odor and flavor of ginger is caused by a mixture of zingerone, shogaols and gingerols, volatile oils that compose one to three percent of the weight of fresh ginger.” This may not mean much, but in my opinion the presence of something called ‘zingerone’ in anything, instantly elevates it to greatness.
Still, tastes like liquorice, aniseed and of course ginger tend to divide the population. You either love them or hate them. One man’s zingerone is another person’s anti-toblerone.
If you hate ginger I would stop reading here. You definitely will not like SodaStream Ginger Ale flavour which even in synthetic form will fill you with fear and loathing. If you do like ginger (like me), lets dose up a bottle and see what we can find! Read more »
Robinsons Orange Flavour
The bunting went up this week and we temporarily donned conical party hats to commemorate the 100th bottle of SodaStream fizzed in SodaStream Review HQ.
Excitement over, it was time for me to roll my sleeves up and get on with the important business of trying another new flavour. I figured that after a recent run of Robinson’s flavours it was sensible to complete the series by trying to create SodaStream out of the most ubiquitous of squash flavours: Orange squash.
As a kid, orange squash could go either way. It was either the flavour you were disappointed to get: commonplace, tepid and diluted to within an inch of its life. Or it could be the best thing in the world: poured from pewter jugs on a makeshift table, ice-cold and joyously sweet after you had flogged your young lungs out dashing round your mate’s garden or competing masterfully in the egg-and-spoon race. Read more »
Robinsons Apple & Pear Flavour
Squash, in general is a good concept. Take a small dash of concentrated fruit essence, add h2o of the common or mineral variety, serve ice-cold for the perfect combination of flavour and refreshment. Juice is good, but a) it’s expensive and b) sometimes it makes you more thirsty than when you started.
However, not all flavours work as a squash or cordial. Orange and lemon yes. Blackcurrant definitely. Apple… well, I’m inclined to say no, but then again, combine Apple with Blackcurrant and you’re back on to a total winner. Whose idea was it to add barley? Who knows which concussed lunatic decided to throw a cereal crop in, but whoever they were, they had genius on the side of madness and get a fruit-based medal. Lemon barley rocks!
So, what about Robinson’s Apple & Pear flavour, which I was forced to pick up from the shops due to a mixture of boredom and foolish risk-taking? We have already established that Apple is a recessive flavour in the world of squash so does Pear – lets face it, a pretty damn tasty fruit, but prone to quick-turning to mush – turn this drink to flavour gold and what is the impact of adding fizz? Read more »
SodaStream Adverts & Living the Dream
My SodaStream drinks maker ran out of fizz 2 weeks ago and I have failed so far to get it reloaded. I managed to get down to the shops with my empty cannister the first weekend, but Robert Dyas had failed to anticipate the massive demand for carbonated water and I spent an unhappy afternoon hefting a depleted cannister round the shops. Oh well… must try again tomorrow.
Given that I can’t try any old or new flavours right now I figured that rather than let this blog run dry (excuse the pun) I’d turn my attention to checking out SodaStream’s promotional efforts and feature a couple of their adverts on their site. So as a first salvo, here is an advert which launched June 2011:
So, here we are with our happy, well-fed and well-heeled city dwelling family. Read more »
Ribena Flavour
Ribena was something I craved as a kid, but was rarely allowed. I think the twin combination of being more pricey than your average juice and also being famed for its epic sugar allowance, put it off my mum’s shopping list. Like anything you’re not allowed as a child, it took on an almost mystical symbolism and I prized those rare occasions when at a pal’s house or at my Gran’s, I got an ice cold glass of the good stuff or when once in a blue moon, Ribena hit buy one get one free territory.
These days I am free to buy cartons or concentrate of Ribena pretty much at will. Still pricey, but not anywhere near as expensive as most of the other much more boring stuff adulthood forces me to buy, it’s a luxury I can choose to afford. I don’t do it that much though. Maybe something about tastes changing as you grow older or the fact that it possesses pretty much zero refreshment value. It doesn’t stand up compared with similarly priced fresh juice and smoothie varieties. Read more »
Robinsons Lemon Flavour
As squash goes, you can’t do much better than lemon squash. Where orange squash is sweet, lemon squash is sweet and sour. Where blackcurrant is artificial, lemon is clean and refreshing. With or without barley, lemon squash has the power to refresh and hydrate. It really is water improved.
So, when I started thinking about trying some new unofficial SodaStream flavours, lemon squash seemed a natural choice. Having decided that, I realised if you’re going to make moves towards the squash world (or cordial or syrup or however you know it) and you want a fair playing field, you can’t do much better than Robinsons. Despite briefly sullying their stock with a short-lived and embarassing alliance with humourless semi-elite tennis player, Tim Henman, generally Robinsons have been a reliable antidote to dehydration on a summers day and also a reliable choice with a dash of honey when you’re bed ridden. Read more »
SodaStream Bottle Cleaning Tips
There’s a lot of good things about SodaStream, but what goes up must come down and inevitably there are a couple of negatives to pursuing the eco-route and making your own soda. Chief of these for me is a) having to wait for your bottles of SodaStream pop to chill once you’ve made up a nice batch of cola and b) having to clean the bottles before you can use them again.
Well, a) is partly solvable – if you have the foresight to pre-chill a bottle of still water either directly in your SodaStream bottles or in a bigger recepticle such as the eponymous Breville water filters (5 extra points to them for the slogan ‘it’s a brevillation’) or the common or garden jug. I do not have that foresight, but who knows maybe one day…
b) however, is a challenge. Washing up in general isn’t much fun and the flip-side is that no-one wants to drink from a bottle of SodaStream with sugar residue at the bottom. So here, are my top tips on how to reduce the pain of keeping those bottles spick and span. Read more »
Official Clear Passion & Mango Flavour
When I was a little kid in the eighties it seemed like every other week, either on TV or in school I got told the tale of the Emperor’s new clothes. You know the one: The Emperor wants some new garments so he gets the finest tailor in the land to put together a fine suit and for whatever reason, rather than making a proper outfit, the tailor puts on an elaborate charade of making a suit out of nothing, all along the way insisting to his client that the materials are of the finest quality. The Emperor ashamed of his ignorance of sartorial matters chooses to believe the clothes do exist. His advisors and eventually the people don’t point out the error, for similar reasons and because they don’t want to offend his kingship. Eventually a small boy points out that the Emperor is wandering around in the nude and the charade falls down.
Well I used to hate that story when I was a kid. It seemed to me that the Emperor was an idiot and that his people were pretty out of order not pulling him up on his mistake sooner. In time though the tale grew on me and these days I find myself thinking about it all the time for a lot of situations in the world, big and small. Read more »
Official Orange Flavour
Orangeade kind of tastes like sunshine doesn’t it? Well, at least that’s what it reminds me of. Hot days running around the garden. Kicking plastic airflow ball around a giant playground only to run inside moments from heat exhaustion collapse to satiate your thirst on a classic mix of citrus and carbonation.
The perfect orangeade is colder than polar ice, fizzy enough to burn away the back of your throat, and sweet enough to dissolve a tooth at one thousand yards. I’m absolutely delighted to say that the official SodaStream Orange flavour delivers on all these counts. Read more »
Pros and Cons of Sodastream
Given the time of year, with many people wondering “is the SodaStream the last minute present to buy for my friend/sibling/parent/colleague (delete as appropriate)”, I thought it might be a good idea to give a list of benefits and drawbacks of owning and using a Sodastream.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Making drinks is fun, the process, the noise, it’s great for kids and adults! | Making drinks and then waiting for them to chill takes time |
| Good for the environment* | Have to wash bottles |
| Cheaper* | Inevitably, not quite as good as the real thing for some flavours (e.g. Coke) |
| New models look good in the kitchen and don’t take much space | You may not want to stump up for the penguin, the nicest looking of the range |
| Flavours stocked in a range of commonly found stores and these days internet ordering makes it easy to get flavours | Storing lots of flavours (if you like having a lot of variety like me) takes up space |
| Wide range of official flavours with more launching all the time | No evidence yet of the brilliant 80s Schweppes and Irn-Bru tie-ins |
| As well as making drinks with the official flavours you can invent your own concepts | Fizzy lemon barley may not turn out to be a good idea |
| Amount of fizz and amount of flavour is under your control | Potential for over fizzing or underdosing if you step outside the guidance |
| Having access to fizzy water is a great thing in itself | Quality of your tap water (or willingness to use mineral water) may affect quality of your drinks |
| Bottles hold onto their fizz for a long time – innovative cap design | Bottles run out quickly if you have a few guests |
| Making drinks and always having great drinks in the fridge is an easy habit to pick up | Running a gas cannister out and not bothering to replace it for a bit can see your Sodastream neglected just like your George Foreman grill and your smoothy maker |
| Product feels retro yet innovative | Some people just shrug their shoulders and feel it is completely pointless |
| Flavours stocked in a range of commonly found stores and these days internet ordering makes it easy to get flavours | Storing lots of flavours (if you like having a lot of variety like me) takes up space |
* More research and evidence to be discussed on these claims in the future. Read more »
Official Lemonade Flavour
I reckon SodaStream Lemonade flavour is statistically the flavour you are most likely to have tried. Usually bundled with your new SodaStream Drinks Maker, you get the thing out of the box, discard the packaging, get the gas cannister in and apply some fizz to your first bottle. Carefully reading the instructions you pour in the syrup – et voila a bottle of lemonade that you may be prepared to chill for ten minutes before getting impatient or probably you just poured it straight out ready for tasting.
So it has quite a bit to live up to given that this is probably the moment where you will find out whether your new SodaStream really can make drinks even as halfway decent as you can pick them up down the corner-shop. Fortunately then, I think the official lemonade flavour does deliver. Good clean, crisp citrus flavour, not too sweet, and works well heavily carbonated or lightly fizzed according to your preference. Definite potential for maximum refreshment, if refreshment is your aim and of course high potential for mixing with an array of alcoholic beverages. Read more »
SodaStream childhood adventures
Back in the eighties when the UK was experiencing its first dose of the SodaStream experience, I regarded the machine with some respect, a little awe and a lot of fun.
Aged somewhere around seven or eight, I had the motor skills to start interacting properly with the adult world of drinks pouring and carbonation, but not always the thorough understanding of the correct order of processes to prevent disaster.
Having been thoroughly trained by my parents in the business of filling the glass bottle up to the right line and then topping up with syrup to one of two bobbles depending on recommended level of flavouring, I set about quickly unlearning and attempting variations of that theme. Read more »
Official Coke Flavour
Trying this flavour was always going to be a clash of the titans. Actually that’s wrong, maybe David vs Goliath. Maybe Samson and Delilah. ;o)
First thing I should explain is that I am a massive Coca Cola fan. I love coke. I drink litres of the stuff each day and no sodastream no matter how good is going to be able to equal the magic, the complicated wonder of a can or even better, an ice cold glass bottle of the good stuff.
This said, I had high hopes for Sodastream Cola, I’m just saying they weren’t unreastically high. I knew Sodastream Coke wouldn’t be as good as real Coke and once you accept that I think it stands as a pretty good drink in it’s own right. Read more »
Official Cream Soda
Ah Cream Soda, as old as the hills, as nostalgic as candy floss and summer fetes and as sweet as a quarter of penny sweets. Somehow I associate the creation of cream soda as being around the time Sodastream or Soda Pumps were first in use back towards the start of the last century. Of course that could all be completely wrong and most likely heavily historically inaccurate.
Fortunately then, the Cream Soda flavour in question is faithful to my memory of Cream Soda and as a concentrated flavour mixed with water from your Sodastream, this flavour stands up well to the method. Cream Soda is just a taste meant to be home made.
A strong, simple, very sweet caramel taste has the sense to keep a bit of crispness. All the right vanilla notes and a good potential to hold the fizz. Very much up to the standard of cream soda you might buy in a can or bottle. Read more »
Official Blackcurrant Flavour
Sodastream blackcurrant flavour crept up on me. After trying a lot of flavours first, I finally got round to it. I figured until Sodastream can arrange some kind of partnership with Vimto or Ribena they had this flavour as a stopgap. I was wrong.
Beneath the slightly more muted purple colours of the concentrate bottle lurks a flavour of true excellence. The surprise champ of the current range, which balances a decent kick of flavour with maximum refreshment.
A lot of the flavours have a dose of pleasing sweetness, but the blackcurrent drops the sugar down a notch. Berry flavours are striking, but not overpowering meaning this is one of the most thirst quenching flavours in the range. It’s a decent blackcurrant drink in it’s own right which stands up to the likes of off the shelf products like Oasis, Tango Blackcurrant and Snapple.
Tastes best with as much fizz as you can put in it. I like to dose just under the recommended concentrate line as this one is really about flavouring your water, not masking it.
What about the big celebrity tie-ins
I seem to remember that in the 80s in the midst of my first foray into the world of Sodastream, various partnerships had been achieved with Schweppes and other big beverage companies to produce a range of premium concentrates. I remember Fanta, Coca Cola and notable Irn Bru and Tizer.
Irn Bru particularly was a great concept. As radically left field as the premade version, with an orange colour fit to stain a small child’s white tshirt at a hundred yards.
Did these flavours exist or am I making this up?