Whether you say Club Soda or Soda Club, this is a great gift idea for dads (or to buy themselves)

At our house, we don’t drink a lot of Coke or Sprite. The kids know that they can really only get these as an ingredient in a Shirley Temple (or Roy Rogers for my boy) when we’re out for a fancy dinner. The only carbonated drinks they get at home are Root Beer on random pizza nights and Pellegrino poured into their juice when we’re having people over for dinner.

An unintentional benefit of keeping all these sugary drinks out of the house is fewer glass bottles to lug up the double staircase of our San Francisco Victorian. And, we have that many fewer bottles to toss in the trash or send to recyclying.

The other night though, we saw a no-guilt and no heavy lifting solution to how to have carbonated water, flavored if desired, easily at home. You may have read an article in the New York Times on carbonated beverages at home that covers the options out there. Some of these machines cost up to $2600. I can’t say the Club Soda version is the hottest design, and maybe even it’s bubbles aren’t as “delicate” as others (could that even be true?), but it worked well enough for our kids and made a pretty good Pelligrino/Perrier stand-in. It’s only $79.99 at SodaClubUSA.com, which should pay for itself in a fairly short amount of time, and also cut down massively on throw-away bottles since it comes with two reusable bottles.