Do you refill your own cylinders or buy from Sodastream/Soda Sense?
Fixed, thanks!
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Just curious, we use a sodastream and find it really good but until this thread, I hadn’t heard of the idea of DIY refill.
Is ‘food grade’ CO2 really a thing? All the DIY instructions seem to talk about using paintball gas tanks, if there is a food grade for CO2, is the gas in the paintball bottles suitable?
It absolutely is. The inside of your average paintball cylinder is not something you would want to ingest. I have refilled my Sodastream cylinders, but am particular about where I source the CO2. I don’t recall now where I saw it, but someone cut a paintball and a “food grade” cylinder in half and the difference was apparent.
Search Amazon for “Sodastream refill adapter”
I’ve also hear of people refilling Sodastream cylinders using dry ice. Sounds like a lot of work, unless maybe you have a free source of dry ice.
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I use Soda Stream or Soda Sense. I have never done it myself.
Yes technically.
But apparently in terms of CO2 you can just go out and buy all of it is at least food grade. We apparently don’t produce much in the way of industrial CO2, or it’s not part of the logistics stream for things that aren’t factories. Every welding store I’ve dropped into their regular bulk gas is food grade, and my company sends out CO2 tanks to accounts for draft equipment and beer festivals. Our wholesaler likewise bottoms out at food grade.
The tank is the issue. A non food safe tank can have lead or other problem materials in the seals and valves. Paint ball tanks apparently have some nasty lubricants in them.
CO2 can be ordered through many beer distributors or got at any welding shop. You can buy a food safe tank. But as most places now swap tanks, you pay a much cheaper deposit for a new tank and just swap instead of searching out a place that fills. Gas costs the same as a fill, you just don’t have to out of pocket for the tank.
I have a 5lb aluminum tank, deposit was $20. They retail for around $70. Using paintball tanks comes from not knowing where to get gas, and the fact that big box sports stores often fill paint ball tanks. But there’s invariably a welding or gas supplier nearby that’s already in the business of providing beverage equipment. A lot of the ones near me sell draft beer regulators and basic parts/gaskets as well.
The adapter Sqyntz mentioned threads onto a standard CO2 tank, letting you screw the soda stream tanks in and refill them. Or can be used to connect the soda stream to a CO2 tank and regulator with the right parts.
But at that point you can fill bottles or kegs or even set up a tap with a few more parts.
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Given the danger of climate change, there’s a certain irony in a “shortage” of CO2.
if someone invented a way to profitably extract CO2 from the air and use it as a fuel or whatever, in 100 years they’d be looking at a global ice age, and deniers who would claim it was all a hoax!
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Funny how if you screw up one thing right here, it totally screws up something way over there, that on the surface seems unrelated. The Singularity came and went years ago.
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It is a recent development, but already invented:
And a method of fuel synthesis:
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There are many systems to recover CO2 from fermentation and they are widely used in geographies were supply of food grade CO2 is difficult (such as africa and some places in LatinAmerica), it is very common to see a soft drink plant next to the brewery
Is not that simple, along with the CO2 you will get along some ethanol, sulphur compounds and a lot of the fermentation esters and the hop volatiles. The gas has to be washed, dried and filtered through activated carbon to eliminate any cross contamination. Again this is technically feasible but a potential source of off flavours, so you need to put in place a quality control system (both sensory and analytical) and be very careful.
The fact is that food grade CO2 is usually a cheap commodity in developed countries and much easier to to buy it and let the supplier worry about all of the above. Any brewery producing less than 100,000 barrels a year will struggle to justify the capital investment
Speaking of food grade, of course it is a thing, some of the CO2 sold is a by product from the oil and industry and definitely you do not want to ingest CO2 with 2% hydrogen sulphide or 0.05% carbon monoxide in it.
One of the best and purest forms can be tapped straight from underground reservoirs
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How do y’all like the soda stream for convenience? I have kid with autism who only drinks caffeine free diet coke, it would be nice to be able to make it on demand. I’d have to see what sweetener they use (if its like diet pepsi and not coke it won’t pass muster with the boss man). But I would use it for sparkling water too.
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I suppose it would be selfish to hold one’s breath during a CO2 shortage anyway.
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It works. You have to run it more pulses than the directions say to get good agressive carbonation if that’s a concern.
I only use it for seltzer, so I can’t speak to the syrups. But IIRC they have more than one option on diet cola to account for the different sweeteners. And you can use any syrup you can get your hands on, non soda stream syrup is cheaper.
It’s loud as fuck though. Scares the hell out of my grandmother’s dog. So if the kid isn’t down with loud noises you might be better off with a soda syphon that uses CO2 cartridges.
Eta: they’re also politically dodgy. It’s an Israeli company and they’re manufactured in one of those settlements that are displacing Palestinians. And all the baggage that comes with that. I wouldn’t have purchased one, it was a gift.
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Well, not knowing what size a barrel is, Maisel produces about 400 thousand hectolitres per annum. So I guess they are above that limit. And yeah, they also made soft drinks in the bottling plant as well, so there is that. I don’t know if they filled their own gas canisters for the restaurants, though. So I guess their production was enough to warrant all the filters and such.
I haven’t looked into what the big breweries here in Munich do, but I would be very, very surprised if Paulaner, Augustiner, Spaten, Hacker-Pschorr and HB didn’t reclaim their own CO2. After all, large quantities are needed during the transportation, during filling of bottles and kegs, and so on. And Germans are all about sustainable development, and not all that keen on fossil sources.
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I have only ever used it to make carbonated water. There are two things i really like about it. I like not using a lot of packaging. If i were drinking seltzer water (like Canada Dry or whatever), then i would be using a lot of aluminum cans or worse plastic bottles. And recycling all of that material has a negative environment impact which i reduce by using soda stream. Second, its cheap and really easy. I’ve been using the same unit and plastic bottles since 2012 and up until recently i was doing the canister exchanges at Target by my house but now I have switched to Soda Sense because Target can’t seem to keep the canisters in stock.
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/me Digs into his old paintball bags for 12 grams and half full 20oz bottles… gaseous gold!
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A barrel is 31gallons/117l in the US, and it’s the standard regulatory measure used in beer production. And I think wine and spirits. I don’t know how official the usage is in Europe, but the UK has its own fixed barrel measure for beer.
And keg sizes are rooted in the barrel measure due to tradition, so its got currency due to that.
Definitely dumber than just tracking things in metric volumes, but there you go.
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In other words, a barrel is a hectolitre plus a chunk of spare change. 
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Purty much.
Think in use euro measure is 100lt flat, since your 1/2 barrel/keg is 50lt. So a hectolitre
Weird thing is in the US we mostly use 1/6 barrels at 20lt for our small kegs, and our quarter barrels are 30lt.
Which does not line up at all with the standard for the barrel measure. So it doesn’t even justify itself based on working with the packaging. It’s only an easy way to calculate things for the one format.
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The things I learn about inhabitants of this specific BBS during the pandemic. Surprises everywhere.
So, Bierfranken could be dealing the hot commodity Carbon Dioxide in the near future, you say? If people kept drinking beer, that is. Damn, the Oktoberfest just got cancelled! Now I understand why the Schaustellerverband is so upset about it…
/s, obviously
Anyway, it’s a bit funny that they vent it. Many mineral waters, e.g., do even do marketing with using their own gas (“Mit eigener Quellkohlensäure versetzt”). I assumed breweries would do that, too? Or do they and still habe the excess amount to clear their tanks?
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