Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff works dot com, where smart happens. Him Marshall Brain with today's question, is it possible to make carbonated water at home? As I've mentioned before, I happen to be on a diet at the moment, and one thing I enjoy while on this diet is drinking carbonated water. You also know it as club soda or seltzer. You can buy it at the grocery store, and from a dieting perspective, it's nice because it has
a slightly different flavor than normal water does. It has a little bit of texture if you want to call it that, because it has the bubbles, and obviously it has zero calories, which is great. The problem with club soda is that it seems ridiculously expensive. For example, where I get it, it's a dollar twenty nine for a two lead bottle. You might be able to find it for a little less than that, but a dollar for
two leaders is probably as low as it goes. When you think about paying a dollar for something that costs a penny coming out of the tap, or even five cents when you filter it yourself, it seems like a pretty high markup. So the obvious question arises, could you make carbonated water at home? And the answer is yes, you can. You need some equipment. The fact is that just about every restaurant you've ever been to that serves
soda makes its own carbonated water. You just need a little equipment and a little expertise, and you could be making your own club soda at home for something like a dime for two leaders or maybe less. All that you need is a bottle that can handle pressure, some cold tap water, preferably filtered, and then a way to pressurize the bottle with carbon dioxide. And usually you do
that with a CEO two tank. So one way to carbonate water at home is to buy a standard size beverage type CEO two tank with a regulator and a hose on it and use that hose to pressure rise a bottle that's filled with cold tap water. And you can buy these tanks there. You know, they're about the size of a normal scuba tank, maybe a little smaller,
and they hold pressurized carbon dioxide. You can buy them or rent them from beverage distributors in your area because this is a standard thing that they would use at a bar or a restaurant to make their own carbonated water, you know, and you might have to spend fifty dollars or a hundred dollars to get the tank and the regulator and the hose. But once you have that, it
only takes seconds to make carbonated water. If you go on YouTube and look this up, or come to the brain stuff blog where I have an article on it, you can see that it. You know, you just put the cold water in the bottle. You have a little special cap that's gonna let the CEO two in but not let it back out. You take your tank, you run the CEO two into the bottle, you shake it up, and a few seconds later that bottle of water is carbonated water or club soda. It took only seconds to
do it. Now, if truth be told, this tank and its regulator and the hose are not the prettiest things you've ever seen in your life. Their industrial So there are companies that now make kitchen appliance type things, the kind of thing you could set on your kitchen counter and it wouldn't look out of place. That carbonate water. Now, these typically cost about a hundred dollars for the machine, and then you pay for little cartridges that screw into
the machine. And this is more expensive, admittedly, because you're paying more for the beauty of the thing, and the cartridges cost a lot more than a big, standardized tank of carbon dioxide does. But it's still an inexpensive, quick and easy way to make carbonated water in your house
on a regular basis. What if you'd like to make carbonated water one time or infrequently, and you don't want to spend the money on the appliance or the industrial tank, you just want to try it out well, then you could make a rig with a little piece of tubing
and a couple of bottles. In one bottle you'd put your cold water that you want to be carbonated, and then in the other bottle you would mix the standard vinegar and baking soda solution that you would use in a science fair volcano project or something like that that's going to produce a lot of carbon dioxide at pressure. So you drill holes in a couple of soda bottle caps, you run a piece of tubing between them, and you
glue them or silicone seal them into place. You put your vinegar and your baking soda in one bottle, screw that cap on. You put your cold water in the other bottle, screw the cap on, and you let that reaction pressurize both bottles, and in a few seconds you have carbonated water on the fresh water side. And again, if you go to YouTube where you come to the brain stuff blog, you can look up how to do this. There are lots of people on YouTube who have made
this little rig and demonstrate how to do it. And just for thorough disks, we should mention the old fashioned way of making carbonated soda. And that's the way they used to make root beer. I've done this a couple of times with the kids here in the brain household.
You take sugar and yeast and some kind of flavoring like root beer flavoring, and you put it in a soda bottle and you shake it up so that the sugar and the yeast dissolve, and then you just let it sit for a week or two and the yeast will eat the sugar, produce carbon dioxide, pressurize that bottle,
and over time create a really fizzy root beer. Now this isn't carbonated water per se, because it has sugar and yeast in it, but it is a carbonated beverage, and it's done using carbon dioxide produced by single cell organisms, which are the yeast cells. So this is a valid way to produce a fizzy carbonated beverage, even though it's not club soda or carbonated water per se. And I guess you could use this technique to create the two
bottle rig. You could have sugar and yeast on one side producing carbon dioxide, and you could have cold water on the other side that's absorbing that carbon dioxide and becoming fizzy. It's just that this process would take several days for the yeast to develop enough pressure to carbonate the water on the right hand side. For more on this and thousands of other topics, does that how stuff works dot com and don't forget to check out the brain stuff blog on the how stuff works dot com
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