Tea and diluted fruit juice worked for me, but I was making beverages for myself to drink, not conducting experiments. This question just makes me wish I had more free time.
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I did a quick search for local CO2 and as an alternative to some of the sources mentioned above: Fire extinguisher servicing places came up. Also it seems the people who want CO2 and do not know where to find it are mainly people who make beer.
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Or, more specifically, who need it in relatively small quantities and want to make sure it isnât contaminated, say, with benzene.
ÂEwwwww.
Yeah, the politics are complicated, but the main result of the boycott seems to be that several hundred Palestinians who had good jobs are now unemployed. Itâs been reported that the government has been refusing work permits so that they could continue working at the plant inside Israel. Which, personally, I think that is the wrong direction to go in. There will be no chance of peace there without economic stability and opportunity.
Iâve got one of these machines and I think itâs greatâI like making my own syrups to use with it. The $15 or $20 it costs for the canisterâI use one or two during the summerâis not worth the hassle of a kludgy workaround.
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Heard of it, but never had one. Iâm more interested in carbonating stuff other than water, so a, say, milkshake isnât diluted to make it fizz. They might all turn out gross but Iâm a fan of edible experiments. Always gets me in trouble in when working with mice 
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Iâm rather curious â how would the benzene end up in a CO2 cylinder (source)? Also, how would lead leach out of a brass fitting, which seems to be what âeveryoneâ says is how you can get lead in your CO2? If you use oil in your CO2 processing plant, I guess you could get a tiny amount of vapor from whatever lubricant you were using. When I was running paintball, we tended not to use things like WD40 on the fittings for the CO2 cylinders, because it would eventually degrade the rubber o-rings. Teflon tape, yes; oil, no.
The main place I see talking about traces of unsavory substances in your compressed CO2 is an outfit that sells meters designed to detect said traces.
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Benzene is one of many hydrocarbon pollutants that can be found in trace amounts in commercial CO2 production. It just happens to be one that is especially potent.
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Hey! I just filled up my 5 pound CO2 tank this morning! Cost me $29 up here in Canada from a local welding supply shop, and should last a few months. I usually alternate between beer and soda water.
The food-grade thing is bollocks, by the way. The whole point of selling stuff like compressed gasses is to get it as pure as possible, anyway.
Gratuitous pic of my 3D printed Tiki tap:
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Until I can make seltzer thatâs as tasty as Polar, Iâll keep just buying my favorite Polar flavors for .69/liter as needed.
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The SodaStream isnât really designed to do that. The way it works is, you clamp a bottle of water to the device forming a pressure seal, then press down on the release, and it gets a shot of CO2. If you try to use anything but water in the bottle, itâll foam all over the place and make a huge mess. Itâs hard to clean and not intended to be disassembled.
That said, I still think carbonated iced coffee should be a thing!
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Youâre right⌠though if you were interested in legalistics, itâs debatable whether the territories are occupied. Another term is disputed territories. After the partition, the borders were left undefined, pending negotiations. The attempted invasion happened instead, was repelled, and no attempt to negotiate the borders has happened since, due (arguably) to recalcitrance on both sides. I would say from my non-historianâs POV, that early in the process the Israelis did want to negotiate borders and the Palestinians didnât. Now of course, the Israelis have matched the Palestinians, and many have converted to maximalist stances.
So the rationale for the settlements, as I understand it, is that since Palestinians donât want to negotiate away things like âright of returnâ or other things, fine - weâll just make the borders any way we want, create a fact on the ground, and they will be the losers.
I donât think thatâs smart in the long term, but then Iâm a bien-pensant petit bourgeois sitting safely in West LA.
Iâve been doing home carbonation with a 5# tank of CO2 and a Carbonator coupler, which I put on 2 liter plastic bottles. Tank lasts for a good 5 months and costs $15 to refill at my local home brewing supplies place. We go through about six to eight liters a week.
What I WISH I could find is a way to refill those 8g CO2 chargers for my soda siphon. Itâs so stylish to use a siphon, but those little cartridges are expensive and wasteful. Any geniuses have any ideas for that?
I guess my next question is how much benzene or other cruft might end up in your CO2, percentage-wise, and how does that compare to the amount you get exposed to in the course of daily life?
A 10x higher exposure if the normal amount is .000000001mg still is a tiny amount, and Iâd want to know if that actually would have a measurable effect. Even the FDA allows for a certain percentage of stuff like insect parts or rat feces in your coffee or peanut butter, for example, being aware that nothing is ever 100% contaminant free as we can currently produce it.
How is it debatable whether the territories are occupied? Jordan occupied the West Bank in 1948 and annexed it in 1950. Their annexation wasnât formally recognized by everyone internationally, but from 1950 to 1967, the West Bank was for all practical (and most legal) purposes part of Jordan, and all Arab residents of the West Bank were offered Jordanian citizenship.
After 1967, when Israel took the West Bank from Jordan, Israel annexed a few small areas. Most of the West Bank, however, including Maale Adumim where Sodastreamâs factory was, remains to this day fully under Israeli military control, but not under Israeli civilian governance, which is pretty much the definition of âoccupied territory.â
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Bah! Bespoke hand-delivered glass bottles is the only way to go.
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I do it all the time. I give my Sodastream one extra spritz so the seltzer is particularly bubbly, then mix it with cold brewed coffee concentrate. Sometimes we cold brew the coffee ourselves, but itâs increasingly easy to find ready-made in grocery stores. Thereâs a brand called Gradyâs with chicory (New Orleans style) that is particularly good with bubbles, and Trader Joeâs has a perfectly acceptable store brand cold brew concentrate.
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Airgas doesnât generally do fills on existing CO2 tanks. Buy the most beat to hell used 5lb tank you can find on craigslist and swap it out for their nice and shiny. Thanks to kegerators, I get shiny new aluminum tanks 9 out of 10 times.
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I purchased a Primo FlavorStation years ago because its tanks donât need hacking to be refilled.
Pro standard tanks: The ones here are refilled in Sweden, by AGA.
Con standard tanks: Theyâre no cheaper for it.
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