Since giving up colas my latest thing is a splash of juice with seltzer in it, but I’m getting tired of lugging the 2 liter bottles home every week. (I’d drink GOOD fizzy water but I’m too cheap and that’s even heavier, as it usually comes in glass.)
I was thinking it might be cool to get a siphon and have seltzer at my fingertips from a mere slip of a CO2 canister, but I don’t have any idea how much they (the canisters) usually go for (I did find one site showing 2 boxes of 10 for around $7, but I think it might have been a wholesaler or something.) I also have no idea how long one canister lasts. Just one bottle? Do all siphons take the same size/style canister? (For instance could I buy an old bottle on eBay and still get canisters for it?)
I have one of the old-time-looking glass-and-chain-link-net on-the-outside ones. It takes standard CO2 cartridges that you can buy at any kitchen specialty store. I haven’t bought any in so long, though, I don’t know how much they cost. The bottle itself I think I got at Williams and Sonoma about six years ago. I seem to remember it cost around 40 bucks.
I first got the thing to make fizzy juice, that is, I’d take thickish fruit juices like pear or guava or peach and squirt some seltzer into them. That was tasty, but it got old replacing the damn cartridges when they ran out.
Now I just fill the thing up every once in a great while to spray people with selzter at parties, but I have to be feeling pretty frisky before I get that nutty.
A box of ten will run you less than five bucks…at least, that’s what I pay in Brooklyn, NY.
Each canister will charge approximately a liter of tap water.
The only downside I see to it is that you always seem to be out just when you have a hankering for a whiskey and soda, and you have to refill the bottle. I’m sure the antique ones you can get on EBay use the same CO2.
I’d say go for it. A new $40 siphon will pay for itself after about 80 liters of soda.
And your friends will think you’re really cool, especially if you refer to it as a “gasogene.”
Of course my friends already think I’m cool, but now that I have the Ukulele Ike seal of approval on my barware, I must really be going places!
Thanks for the help, my main concern was if current canisters would work on old siphons. Seems a shame they don’t last longer, but the price does work out to about what I was paying for the 2-liter bottles from the store.
I’ve often wondered about these as well. How long does it last? IE, can I put a cannister in, fill it up with tap water, and leave it in the fridge for a week? Or does it only work for a few hours?
I never tried putting mine in the fridge, so I don’t know what would happen, or if the cold would affect the squirty mechanism. As far as how long it lasted, I noticed that if I used the bottle every day to make about two eight-ounce fizzy juices, it would last maybe about a month.
So, the CO2 must last at least that long. I don’t know what would happen if you let the bottle sit for a month with a cartridge in it without using it. I’m guessing it would be okay, because I let the cartridges sit in the box for months and they were still fine to use.
Ukulele Ike can probably give you more specific info!
Really? A month? Wow. The “put in the fridge” part was only an idea. I was really wondering if once you put the cartridge in, you had to use it right away.
I’m buyin’ one. Wonder if Amazon.com carries them?
You guys are all rookies. Real seltzer comes in thick (seemingly bulletproof) quart-sized blue or green glass bottles with rusty chrome, trigger squirt tops. They come packed twelve to the creaky, paint-flaked, worm-eaten wooden box, and come delivered to your home by the Hoffman soda man who takes your empties back to the factory for refilling.
That’s how Abbott & Cosello and the Three Stooges, I have no doubt, got theirs. And, by golly, that’s how stuygrandma and stuymom got theirs too. This, of course, was back when Brooklyn had it’s own major league ball club and the seltzer was used to make eggcreams that were drunk while munching Ebbinger’s coffee cake. (And when Ukelele Ike was a mere glimmer in the eye of some ne’er-do-well in Ohio.)
So you kept refilling it while the cartridge was in it? Here I was thinking that you’d somehow blow yourself across the room if you did that. Or do you take it out first? (Wouldn’t the CO2 then escape into the room?) I just won an auction for one on eBay, in the original box, so here’s hopin’ it still has the instructions with it.
No, no, the cartridge and the water stayed in the bottle for a month, as far as I can remember. It just took me that long to use the water up, because I didn’t use a lot of water each day. It only takes a couple of squirts to make the juice fizzy.
See, look, I guess you could ostensibly refill the bottle if the water goes before the cartridge is used up, because on mine, the cartridge-squirt-mechanism are all one piece. So once you screw the cartridge into the top part, then you stick the cartridge-squirt-thing, which has a long tube attached to it, down into the water, and screw the whole thing onto the bottle. You can screw and unscrew the cartridge-squirt-thing at will, without compromising the integrity of the cartridge itself. Remember, the water in the bottle is still tap water (and sits in the bottle as tap water) until you actually squeeze the trigger on the squirt mechanism. I guess it somehow blows CO2 into the water and then blows what is now seltzer water into your glass. I don’t know; I never wondered about the physics or aquadynamics of my selzter bottle!
It did make sense, thanks. I’m now wondering if they’re all like that though, because some of the descriptions I was reading about some of them said something like you insert the canister, then shake the bottle up to carbonate the water, then you spray it out. I hope mine turns out to be like yours! LOL
Mr. Athena just came home with an ISI brand siphon. It’s one of the ones that you dispense the CO2 into the bottle, then shake it vigorously.
First impression is that the water dispensed is not highly carbonated. The stuff you get out of cans is much fizzier. Maybe I didn’t shake it vigorously enough. How fizzy is the water out of yours? Did I do something wrong?
Yeah, I’ve found that the seltzer I made in the siphon wasn’t as fizzy as the stuff you get in a bottle from the store, but it was still fizzy enough to make tasty juice spritzers, or jazz up whatever drink you wanted to add some zip to.
The nice thing about the siphon seltzer is that it’s not so strongly fizzy that it makes you hiccup when you drink it. It doesn’t “burn” your mouth or tongue either, as I noticed the bottled seltzer often does.
The Mame household drinks more soda water (trans:= seltzer water) than you would think possible. Our favourite non-alcoholic summer drink is soda water with fresh lemon juice, or if we’ve been really coordinated, lemon juice ice cubes. If you want a range of soft drinks on hand for kids, you can get several of the plastic storage bottles and appropriate soft drink flavourings. Or use fresh fruit juice.
We used to use the cute soda siphon with the thick glass walls, metal mesh round the outside and a squeeze gizmo on top, but all those small disposable cartridges were a relatively expensive (and given the number of cartridges going to landfill, environmntally unfriendly) way of doing it.
We now use something called a [“Soda Stream” machine](http://www.sodastream.co.uk/concept.htm machine). It uses a large, refillable CO[sub]2[/sub] cylinder. Several stores here in Australia, such as hardware stores and general merchandisers such as K-mart stock the machines and cylinders, and you just exchange the empty for a full one at the counter, for a cost of about $Aus8, which is about $US4.
Less aesthetic sure, but way more practical.
The machine, including gas cylinder, is a bit smaller than a 2L soft drink bottle.
If you look on Google you’ll find they are available in the US (they are apparently a UK product), but the UK site gave a clearer picture and explanation than the US sites I checked.
