Saturday, March 2, 2013

Revisiting Keurig and Homemade Soda

I thought I would come back and revisit what I wrote about the Keurig Coffee machine and making homemade soda.  Some discoveries recently made me feel like I need to shout out to the world about what I have found out.  And I think I'm going to start off with the homemade soda first.

I just recently gotten (like yesterday) a keg and a picnic tap to make 5 gallons of carbonated water so that the kids and I can make our own choice of flavors for soda.  Spent most of the day setting it up and carbing the water.  My son made the first soda this morning and it turned out better than when we were using the 2 liter bottles and the Carbonator Cap. We are still working on how much syrup it will take for a glass of soda, and I need to get a better pump system for the syrup so we can measure it better, but the results, so far, exceed what I had hoped for.

As for the Keurig, we are still in love with it.  I know I suggested to get the My K-Cup that Keurig makes for these machines, but been having problems with it.  One of my biggest issues is that we have to pretty much take the machine apart to use it.  I'm going to put mine away for emergencies.  Solofil works wonders, but you need to have 2-3 on hand as constant use clogged it up and it had to be soaked in bleach to clean it. In my stumbling around on the internet, I ran across this site My-Cap.  If you don't want to follow the link, these are reusable caps and cups that you can get.  I ordered the sample pack and couldn't be more happier.  They are just like the ones you can buy in the store, only you can fill them with what you want.  We keep coffee in 3 of them, and the rest have tea bags just sitting in them. Much easier to use when half-asleep than trying to fill a Solofil or one of the others. They did sell a template for folding your own filters, but after looking at the site, it looks like they don't offer that anymore.  We are still working on it here, but if you buy the 4 cup sized basket filters, you can shove one in the reusable cups, trim the top off and try that.  But the first one we tried, it overflowed the cup, so need to work on that one some more.   It's nice to be able to reuse these over and over again and not have to worry about running to the store to get more cups for the machine.

Sorry for my rambling, but when I get excited about something, I need to shout it out to the world.  At least I'm trying to do my part with these 2 products/ideas so that my family won't add too much to the plastic waste heading to the landfills.



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