We Review SodaStream

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. Primarily, I review flavours – both the official SodaStream versions and other unofficial creations. Get involved by leaving your comments and let me know what you think about your SodaStream!

Official Lemon and Lime Flavour

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With the exception of a few tropical showers, Summer is still here and the Brits are to be found exposing their legs to the rays, doing unusual things like attending rooftop cinemas, sitting in the park and going out without a bowler hat and an umbrella.

SodaStream Reviews HQ has been a veritable hive of activity, what with the arrival of a new cannister of gas, a new baby in the family and more work than anyone can shake a stick at. It’s been the ideal time to keep the fridge stocked with bottles of SodaStream, keep the fan on at maximum and dispense copious amounts of fizzy beverages to any guests within earshot.

I sat down this morning with a bottle of SodaStream Lemon Lime flavour for the first time, neither filled with trepidation or excited by the challenge ahead of me. On the one hand, a new flavour is always something to be ready for, palette cleansed for the fair judging of flavours. On the other hand, I pretty much figured what it would be like: Lemonade with a twist. Read more »

The most refreshing SodaStream Flavours

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For those of you who don’t live in the UK, you may not realise that for the last few years we’ve been living through some kind of miniature ice age, staring forlornly out of our condensated windows as the rain beats against the glass and makes small splashes in the puddles and churned up mud in the garden. Forced to wear bowler hats, carry out umbrellas, drink even more tea and talk about the weather even more than usual, we’ve shrank as a nation back from the outside, trapped indoors with our tins of baked beans, in-laws and over politeness.

But now at last, the great turtle, that most masterful of cricket bowlers in the sky, has at last relented and good times have come again. Sunshine in all its vitamin D dispensing glory has returned to this blighted kingdom and everywhere you look there is the sight of the lesser-spotted English-person peeping from their burrow, slowly divesting themselves of three layers clothing and exposing their anaemic skin to the risk of pink face. Read more »

Offical Strawberry : Sparkling Natural for Kids

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I don’t have any kids, but lots of my friends and acquaintances do and from what I have observed from studying them, it seems this kids business is a pretty full-on endeavour. As soon as one arrives, life changes massively: Not necessarily for the worse – these people seem pretty damn happy, sometimes almost fanatically – but it certainly is a game changer as much as a nappy/diaper changer.

Out goes caring about how you dress and the frivolous pursuit of alcoholic beverages, modern music and youtube videos. In comes people-carrying automobiles, loose knit sweaters and an unusual awareness of the child friendliness of any given room. They move about in buggy laden, bry-nylon clad groups, giving advice on improving sleep routines and the best way to instil a sensible feeding pattern, constantly looking for signs of prodigal greatness or impending doom in their offspring.

Ah, but this is not a post intended to mock these people. They are no more silly, pompous or misguided than someone spending the early part of a Monday night writing about SodaStream flavours, a twenty something getting ready for a big night out, a workaholic searching for millions in a broke down economy or a circus seal barking for a ball when all it wants is fish. This is a review which recognises that as parents we are genetically programmed to adore our infants. Hard-wired to do our best to put them on the path to a happy life. Fully intent on clearing their path of dangers and obstacles and that my friends is entirely as it should be… Read more »

Official Mojito Flavour

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Cocktails are a curious and dangerous invention which can either leave you dancing to Heart of Glass by Blondie and talking to that girl/boy you’ve been pining for for months, or see you humiliate yourself, slumped unconscious in your chair having been sick on someone’s face.

The Mojito, a rum based cocktail, has had its own massive and primarily positive impact on my personal life (vivid flashback to an Old Street bar circa 2004), so whilst I try to avoid cocktails in general, I have been known to sip on its minty, citrus, crushed ice goodness and feel my face warming as the rum works its seafaring sea-shanty magic.

As a result, I was curious to see some six months or so ago that SodaStream had launched its own range of non-alcoholic cocktail mixers including the eponymous mojito. Though naturally suspicious of turning an alcoholic drink based on having some cut up lime and fresh mint, into a pre-mixed toxic syrup mixed with home-carbonated water, the concept was so weird that I couldn’t help but be intrigued. Read more »

The Sounds of SodaStream

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It occurred to me this week that one of the reasons that making your own fizzy drinks is so much fun is that the noises a SodaStream makes are most excellent. From the gurgle of pouring water, to the whoosh of injecting carbon dioxide to the hiss of opening a bottle, it’s all auditory gold.

With this in mind I thought I’d provide a few SodaStream noises for your enjoyment and reference. Read more »

Official Dandelion and Burdock Flavour

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I don’t think I ever got to try Dandelion and Burdock as a kid. It stood well outside the familiar collection of cokes, fantas, and lemonades, somewhere out there in the serious adult world of ginger beers, tonic water, and cups of tea. In time I grew to try Ginger Beer and learn to respect it for the truly wonderful flavour it is. I got to try root beer through my local branch of McDonalds. Eventually I even beheld the wonder that is Cream Soda, but I never tried Dandelion and Burdock. I watched it with scepticism, noticing the chemist like styling, the dark medicine bottle and the olde worlde font, the small amount of dust on the bottles in my local supermarket indicating its dwindling popularity, and I stood safely back.

I’m now drinking a glass for the first time, freshly brewed up from my SodaStream and I am not by any means kicking myself for being remiss and delaying my tasting so far. I can say with total certainty that this drink is heave-inducingly rancid. An abomination of a flavour: 3 parts lizard, 1 part emu, 1 part dirty tortoise, and no parts tasty. Read more »

Official Cherry Flavour

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I’ve been hunting SodaStream Cherry flavour like Indiana Jones hunted for the Sankara Stones. Piecing together the clues in my handy notebook, travelling from continent to continent with a red line following my progress, watching and waiting before commencing my run across the rope bridge where so many of my pursuers are destined to fall to the crocodile infested waters below.

Well… not really, but it does seem to have been an effort to get hold of this flavour. When I first got my SodaStream and went on the website to buy some flavours I had my eyes peeled for cherry, but to my dismay the item showed as Sold Out and I was compelled to satiate my soda curiosity with the likes of blackcurrant and cream soda. Over the following months I checked back from time to time and every time I looked, I had picked the wrong day, and it was still Sold Out. Read more »

New flavours to review for 2013

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new flavours January 13

I’ve finally drunk enough of my old flavours (even the ones I don’t like) that I have freed up enough room in the soda cupboard to allow for a new order of SodaStream flavours. A parcel from the fine folks at Sodastream UK arrived this week. I’ve tried to pick a range of styles of flavours, including some recent inventions to allow for some choice reviewing: Mojito for the sake of weirdness, Dandelion & Burdock for a respectful nod to the venerable old-skool and one of the new ‘Natural for kids’ range, Strawberry, to see whether healthy equates to good. Whether any of these flavours will be ‘natural’ or even better ‘good’, remains to be seen, but I’m delighted to finally get my hands on some Cherry flavour, tentatively interested in the new Cola recipe and speculate that ‘Xstream Energy’ flavour has the potential to be the downfall of empires and/or the breaker of Olympic records.

SodaStream Caption Competition

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dinosaur-sodastream

I’ve got a new flavour order on its way from the good folks at SodaStream which contains such wonders as Mojito flavour and Cherry Flavour and to be doubly prepared, I’ve just equipped myself with a new cannister of CO2 in readiness for some new reviews.

Until the new flavours arrived, I figured the best way to pass the time was by presenting you with a picture of a dinosaur themed Sodastream scene (inspired by a weekend trip to the National History museum). I spent some time trying to think up a good caption for the picture before I realised that you could do a lot better than me. So, I invite you to let me know your caption by leaving a comment below and I will pick the best one at some point in the coming weeks. The prize is likely to include respect from your peers, a review dedicated to the person of your choosing and raised self-esteem (possibly yours, possibly mine).

The History of SodaStream

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A couple of weeks ago, much to my delight, my esteemed colleague Bobert forwarded me a clipping from a newspaper from 1926 showing an advert for SodaStream (see picture to the left) and it got me thinking about the origins of SodaStream. I knew the product went back further than my first glimpse of the brand in the 1980s, but I realised that I didn’t know much about the Sodastream story and that it was high time I donned my best investigative deerstalker hat, whipped out the old reporters shorthand notebook and biro and did some hard-nosed reporting on the origins of the great purveyor of fizz. So, here is my breakdown on the history of SodaStream:

Ancient fizztory

Since mankind has been bathing in natural spring water, people have been extolling the virtues of doing so and given that some mineral water is naturally fizzy due to the presence of carbon dioxide, we can safely assume that humans have been drinking fizzy water since the dawn of time. Where we think of the Egyptians watching their boundary stones and whipping their slaves in the pursuit of constructing giant stone monuments we should see them satiating their thirst on a glass of fizzy water, flavoured by honey, lemons or rosewater. Where we dream back to Cleopatra facing off against the romans and bathing in milk we should imagine she did so, comforted by a glass of pop. We don’t know a huge amount about these drinks, but we do know that up to relatively modern times it was common to provide distilled drinks such as beers or other alcohol to ensure that the water was safe to drink and that flavouring water has existed as a practice from ancient times, as much to prevent it tasting foul as to add to the interest.

The invention of carbonation

The prodigious chemist, inventor and chum of Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), spent a period of his life investigating gases and is credited with the discovery of oxygen (though he named the gas with the rather cumbersome title of dephlogisticated air), along with hydrochloric acid, nitrous oxide (laughing gas), carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide. In 1767, no doubt parched from his efforts generally discovering everything, Joseph produced the first drinkable manmade glass of carbonated water, using a process involving suspending a bowl of water above a beer vat at a local brewery in Leeds, England. The refreshment produced from this experiment enabled him to concentrate on various experiments related to electricity and carbon dioxide over the next few years, before in 1772 he realised it was high time he published his findings in the paper “Impregnating Water with Fixed Air”, but he never exploited the business potential of making fizzy water, believing at the time (erroneously) that the best use of his product was in the preventing of scurvy on naval vessels.
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Number of bottles fizzed 272

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