Force carbonate in PET bottles?

So I was looking over kegorator/keezer setups, and was getting into the idea of force carbonation.

So I decided to have a go at force carbonating soda; in a burst of insufficient thought, I grabbed a 20 lb CO2 canister, some tubing, a regulator, a carbonation cap, some hose clamps, and a quick disconnect. I mixed them together until combined, mixed up a ginger/rhubarb soda, and tried to carb it at room temperature.

Naturally, I failed miserably at this point, no carbonation. Thinking a bit further, and re-reading the boring bits of the docs I realized that I needed the liquid to carbonate to be cold.

Has anyone tried force-carbing in soda bottles, and what is the optimal temperature/pressure? Doing it at 40 PSI ATM, which worked well on a mead I was able to get below 32°s.

Anything in the 30s will work.

You can force carb at room temp. It just doesn't absorb the c02 easily.

I have found that soda takes longer to carbonate than beer does.

I do it all the time. I hook it up to 40 psi, and gently shake until no more gas goes in. I do that several times over the course of a day, and it's carbed up nicely. If the soda is room temperature, you may have to use a higher pressure to carbonate.

It's true that it's faster and easier with cold soda. Often, I'll stick it in the fridge and keep it on the gas at 30 psi, and that really does the trick.

Also, even though you can carb warm liquid at higher pressures, it is also less likely to hold onto that carbonation if you open the container while it's still warm. People that serve warm soda at parties and justify it by placing a bucket of ice nearby know nothing about physics.

Shake the soda with the carb cap and CO2 connected until you don't hear the tank/regulator making noise. Leave a good amount of headspace, and do it cold. I had great results with this method when making 8 500mL bottles of soda in succession.

Same experience here as others, I get the liquid COLD and then shake for a few minutes at 40 PSI. Sometimes I hit them once more the next day, especially if the bottles have softened at all over night.

Well, being a complete novice at this we tried to carbonate a bottle of wine in the SodaStream carbonation unit. Unfortunately when we bought the unit it was missing the manual which we haven't received yet. So we made virtually every mistake you could. The wine should have been chilled first. I didn't. We hit it with the lowest charge rate and everything looked fine until the contents started fizzing and foaming and spraying out of the locking cap. Needless to say we were cleaning up the mess on the counter and mopping up the floor. We lost half a bottle of wine in the process. The wine tasted good and had a little charge in it. We will try it again with a good chill on the liquid first next time. Till then, " Salute a todo"

Maybe if you hooked up with recent "sodastream advice" thread instead of this ancient one, you would see more of the guidelines. Most things foam like crazy... assume they do unless you know otherwise. Sodastream probably has their ridiculously brief directions book on the web.

They advise to carbonate water only, and after it is chilled. Then they say to charge it three blips after you hear the first buzz... the same questionable advice is on a sticker of their machine. If you fully chill the water, it can take up to 40 strokes to buzz and will get ridiculously overcharged and more easily turn into foam volcano when you add syrup. They must be assuming you didn't fully chill it, and then the buzz comes with less overcharge (or else they just want to sell more co2 refills).

If you want to break the guidelines like carbonating non-water, I posted a new york times article on that under a sodastream advice thread I believe. You have to be willing to clean spray off your ceiling unless following peoples successful experiments. I started a thread on successful sodastream experiments, and can't understand why you gravitate to a thread made before sodastream was available rather than scroll down a few pages to the sodastream threads.

Like I said before, sodastream seems to be scientifically designed to fail if you don't use their bad tasting overpriced syrup. It takes great care to work around the minefields they devised... it is like the idea of razorblades where they want to hook you on an innocent looking affordable device, and make their money on the replacement stuff (blades, syrups, co2)