Sparkling Water, What Is It?

Sparkling water is the common name of bottled carbonated water, a refreshing zero-calorie drink with any meal.

Carbonated water is the perfect drink with any meal and can be purchased with or without flavour.  Flavoured sparkling water is usually flavoured with one or more fruits.  Through alternating flavours, you never need to get fed up with any one in particular and so you can always enjoy a nice sparkling water.

Sparkling water has no calories, no artificial sweeteners, and no synthetic colour additives.  It is simply carbonated water flavoured with fruit aromas.

You can also make your own sparkling water in a soda machine, like the renowned Wassermaxx or Sodastream (Soda Club), and you can even flavour it with aromas.  More and more people even have advanced machines built into their kitchens for serving iced carbonated drinks.  This is obviously quite expensive, with professional set-ups going for 1600 Euros and up; but the carbonic acid is cheap.  With bottles of 3-4 kilograms and only 6-8 grams per litre, this all adds up to a few cents for a litre of sparkling water.  Using a soda machine with carbonic acid bottles of the regular 425 grams usually adds up to 16 cents per litre.  This is still quite cheap compared to buying carbonated beverages, but buying large bottles of acid is most cost effective.

There are cheaper machines where you can get carbonated water through a tap, but these use small canisters of carbonic acid, and they do not cool the water.  Before purchasing such a device, you should taste the sparkling water produced a number of times, to verify a proper level of carbonic acid.

Beware, if the salesperson of the machine speaks of “lightly carbonated water” you should be careful and test the machine properly.  You really should be able to mix the water so that it suits the entire family, since if anyone thinks the mix is wrong, they won’t be using the machine, which would be a shame.