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Review: Drinkmate Carbonated Drink Maker

Here are Gardenerd HQ there’s one person with European sensibilities who loves fizzy water in this house: my husband. So when Drinkmate offered to send me a carbonated drink maker, I jumped at the chance. I always post on Earth Day about environmental policy, and steps we can take to reduce our impact on the planet. But in this house, Earth Day is Everyday, and reusable carbonation systems like Drinkmate help keep single use disposable plastic bottles out of the landfill.

My husband buys plastic bottles filled with fizzy water all year long. Sure, they go in to the blue recycle bin, but the truth is that only 9% of plastics actually get recycled. Don’t believe me? Watch John Oliver’s recent video about it here. Folks like me have known this for years, but it’s nice to see it getting mainstream attention.

Drinkmate unboxing
The Drinkmate came with a CO2 cartridge, storage bottle, cap, and instructions.

My husband was excited to test out this machine, having researched over the last few years about how to recharge a CO2 cartridge locally (for even less waste). We unboxed the unit, washed out the provided storage bottle, as instructed, and filled it with water to test.

Drinkmate in action
The husband took to it like a kid with a new video game.

Next we readied the ingredients for a tasty beverage. Mint, ginger, and lemon.

lemon ginger mint
Home grown mint, lemons, and store-bought ginger ready for muddling.

He dropped the mint and ginger into a glass and crushed it with a spoon, threw in some ice, and squeezed the lemon over it all. Then came the moment of truth.

Ginger Mint Sparkling Water
Ginger Mint Sparkling Water in hand, the husband is happy.

“It’s fun, it’s easy, and it hits the spot,” says the husband. Given that he’s a physicist, he’s been experimenting with pressure (just how much CO2 can a bottle of water hold? How long will it last? If you store it with the carbinator cap on does it help? Does gentle agitation vs. aggressive shaking make a difference?) At present, he loves to re-pressurize right before drinking the bottle that’s been stored in the fridge.

The best news of all is that we haven’t tossed a single plastic bottle into the recycling bin since the Drinkmate arrived. And if all goes according to plan, we won’t have to replace the container that came with the unit for 2 years. And the cartridges are exchangeable locally, so that’s good too.

If we had our druthers, the bottle would be glass, but we’re not looking a gift horse in the mouth. The Drinkmate serves the purpose and saves plastic from the landfill to boot. You’ll find a slew of recipes for cocktails, mocktails, and infused waters on their website. This spring we’ll be adding home-grown blackberries, strawberries and lemon juice to our fizzy water as they come in from the garden.

This Post Has 10 Comments

  1. Lil

    Hey it’s great! What’s not great? $60 for the refills! No thanks!

    1. Kaitlyn

      Lil, I feel you. If it were actually $60 I wouldn’t do it either. But Drinkmate pays for return shipping and they give you a $25 credit or discount or something for sending back the empty canisters (same as a propane exchange). So it comes out to $35 for, what do they say, 120 liters of carbonated drinks? It works out to be kinda great.

  2. Patty

    Where do you get it?

    1. Christy

      As mentioned in the blog post, they mailed it to me as a sample to test out.

  3. Ali Abdallah Shaaban

    Interested

  4. William Landolt

    Can you recarbonate diet coke

    1. Christy

      I haven’t tried it, but if you put it in the Drinkmate container and pop it in the carbonator, it will inject CO2 into it to revitalize it.

    2. Kaitlyn

      Yes. It just should be cold. Although I don’t know why you’d want to carbonate warm diet coke… *shudder*

  5. Tushar dalmia

    It’s just great .wish I could get one.

  6. Jane Wang

    I can’t compare this to a soda stream because I’ve never had one of those. What I had was an addiction to Diet Coke which was easily translated into a harder addiction for La Croix and more recently Bubly. I fell in love with fizzy water. Hard. The amount of recycling was getting embarrassing. The UPS guy was getting annoyed with my endless orders from Amazon. After being trapped in the desert (ok, Las Vegas) with NONE of my choices available, I fell i love with plain soda water, seagrams and smart water. So now that I had given up on flavoring, I thought I might try the Drinkmate. HOLY SMOKES. It is now the most used appliance in my kitchen

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