This Soda Maker Is the Ultimate Sparkling Water Upgrade

There’s nothing wrong with my SodaStream, but it’s been looking a bit long in the tooth lately. It’s a Jet model that’s gotta be around 10 years old and is scuffed up enough that I moved it from my countertop to a cupboard in a fit of appliance shame. Perhaps this was why at a recent trade show I paused longer than I otherwise might have in front of a Swedish steel-and-glass number called the Aarke Carbonator Pro .

With a riveted-on name tag, the whole thing would be right at home in a grad-school science lab. When I called one in to review, though, I was pleased with how it looked on my countertop, a pro in on official business, classing up the “tall and skinny” appliance section of my countertop, alongside the coffee grinder and electric water kettle. The Carbonator Pro.

My wife, Elisabeth, quickly noted how the glass bottle it comes with looks much nicer on the dinner table than our plastic SodaStream bottle, and we both appreciated how well it worked. We even felt like we had earned our way up to “pro”-level users, regularly drinking so much carbonated water that my folks, who were tired of stocking up on La Croix, surprised us a few years back when they got a carbonator for us to use at their house when we visit. The Aarke is certainly elegant—if you can say that about an appliance that, like its competition, makes a farting noise when it’s done.

In a nice touch that can now be found in other carbonators, instead of screwing the bottle into the nozzle, you just set the bottle into the base, lower a cylindrical cover over it until it locks in place, then press the button on top. It’s easy enough to use that if you have used a SodaStream or other similar carbonator (aka soda maker), like the DrinkMate , there’s almost nothing to learn with the Pro. It accepts the same carbonation cartridges used by the competition.

You press the button to carbonate, and you can fine tune with a few extra squirts of CO 2 at the end. Honk honk and you’re done. Aarke’s carbonators even use the same CO 2 canisters as SodaStream, which makes swapping them out much easier.

And like SodaStream, the company even has a convenient canister mail-in exchange program called the Cylinder Loop . It’s also worth noting that the carbonated water it produced felt and tasted identical to what we’ve been making at home for years. Still, it took little testing to know that the Carbonator Pro worked well, that I enjoyed using it, and that I appreciated its more sustainable mostly glass-and-metal makeup.

It currently comes in a stainless steel or matte black, and it’s no surprise that our friends at America’s Test Kitchen call Aarke’s Carbonator III model the “most stylish” soda maker in their March review. Hoo boy, though, you’ll pay a lot for the Carbonator Pro’s style. It’s priced at $350, which means it’s time to cue up the soundtrack for the full math-gymnastics floor routine you’ll need to do to justify buying one.

The choice will almost certainly bubble down to your sense of aesthetics and how much disposable income you can fork out for a soda maker. The Carbonator Pro works almost identically to SodaStream’s Aqua Fizz, which comes with two glass bottles and costs less than half of the Pro’s price. (At $350, the Aarke comes with just one bottle and no gas cylinder, which feels surprisingly stingy.

) In the end, the choice might just depend on whether you’ll display your carbonator on the countertop or just stick it in the cupboard. Either way, honk honk and you’re done. .