Apathy Tree

The way we made it at the place I worked was to puree fruit, then reduce it a bit over heat (no added sugar), then put like 2tbsp or so over ice and topped off with the carbonated water.

So it’ll only really work well with flavors that don’t degrade in heat, but you may also have luck with just straight pureed fruits like watermelon, not super sure how that’d turn out.

You can also use fruit syrups that you buy or make yourself, tons of recipes out there.

Those co2 cartridges are like $30 for 20 16-gram charges. I have them for my ukeg (pressurized growler). They keep 2 gallons of beer pressurized and dispense it, but I’d assume they are only enough for about 2 liter to carbonate from still. So roughly 10 gallons for $30 vs 25-50 gallons for about the same price (only considering ongoing CO2 costs) with the keg setup.

So you can, yeah, but it’s substantially more expensive in the long run, and a 5 gallon keg plus everything else really doesn’t take up a lot of space. They are tall and narrow, and you need to put the soda syphon thing somewhere, too, and I assume that’s taking precious counter space, rather than sitting in a dead space corner behind a door, or tucked into a closet or something.

Really it’s just a matter of how much you’ll use. If you don’t go through 5 gallons of carbonated water in a reasonable timeframe, like monthly so you can clean everything out, it doesn’t really pay to make a big batch. You can get a 2.5 gallon keg if you want a smaller batch, but those are tough to source used and are thus pricier (place I’ve bought from before has them for $120, about the same price as a full-size keg of the same brand)

You can pick up a used ball keg, probs $25-30, a cheap regulator, some tubing and a carbonating cap (you can skip the carbonating cap, which last I looked is some $25, just hook the CO2 line to the dip tube, it’ll take longer to reach carbonation saturation, but it works fine), and a hand faucet for $1 and rent a CO2 tank (last time I filled a 5lb cylinder it was $30 which includes the cylinder) and make gallons of the stuff for decreasing spend.

Upfront cost is moderately high, yes thats true, but the more you use it the less it costs per gallon. And no plastic bottles, no questionable water source, no shipping pollution. You just have on demand carbonated water. If you add fruit puree, you can make “Italian soda”, or you can buy the soda syrup businesses and such use if you want, though you’ll want something in a pump bottle and not a box that hooks to a big system…

One 5lb tank of co2 is enough for 5-10 batches, depending how heavily carbonated you like, and each batch is 5 gallons, assuming a standard 1/8 barrel keg, so the math is pretty appealing if carbonated water is a thing you like.

Im on fixed income at the moment so: Meat, eggs, and unfortunately most fresh produce at this point. I’m doing what I can to grow my own, but there’s a huge project in need of doing before I can really hit the ground on it. I have a small flock of chickens for eggs, and sometimes raise quail for meat (I’m too poor to be vegan/vegetarian; the birds turn waste into eggs and muscle, I give them as good a life as I can, and slaughter humanely with neutral gas when the time comes), but mostly I just eat shelf-stable stuff that I can buy bulk and cheap.

And since food is a struggle, I also don’t really buy anything else anymore. Too expensive to justify.