My friend Alex is awesome. He introduced Brian and I to the world of drones and FPV miniquads. His OneWheel adventures were a strong influence on my own decision to learn how to ride an electric unicycle. He’s also helped me make some important video and audio equipment decisions for my own vlogs.

A handful of us were out social distancing together on the bike trails at the park on Saturday. Alex told us about his Sodastream adventures, and he told us about all the work he did to create a tutorial video.

A Sodastream machine turns regular water into carbonated water. Sodastream sells all sorts of syrups to turn that carbonated water into approximations of your favorite soft drinks, but Alex is only interested in plain old seltzer water.

Sodastream machines use expensive proprietary carbon dioxide canisters. They’re full of the same compress CO2 you can buy in all sorts of places, but they’re smaller tanks, and they cost a lot more.

Alex has modified his machine to accept larger canisters. In his video, he explains how to modify your Sodastream to accept the larger canisters, and he also explains how to fill those canisters at home. Guess what? You fill those larger canisters using an even bigger canister!

Our friend Brian has made seltzer water at home too. He had an extra 5-gallon keg in his keezer. He wasn’t going to be brewing beer for another month or so, and he didn’t know what to put in it. He filled it up with filtered water, and he pumped carbon dioxide into the keg.

Alex’s Sodastream mod is more accessible to the masses than Brian’s keg of seltzer, and I don’t imagine seltzer water stays fresh in a keg for nearly as long as beer or nitro cold brew coffee. For most seltzer fans, making one liter of fresh seltzer water at a time is probably the way to go!