Noob Soda Making Questions

My family is currently on a sugar free diet and we have to avoid aspartame. After about 2 weeks of it, the kids were on the verge of revolution because they do like some occasional fizzy water and the majority of the diet stuff has aspartame.

When I was trying to think of some ways to keep the peace, I remembered seeing a soda making device on a Bed, Bath, and Beyond flyer back around the holidays so I went there and purchased one of them.

Since buying it I have made a cream soda that was sweetend with sucralose that I really didn't care for myself, but some others drank it and said it was good. I used some strawberry and raspberry McCormick extracts and made a soda that i also didn't like much. I used some McCormick and some Equate brand root beer extracts that I sweetened with stevia that weren't too terribly bad. I actually liked the Equate brand's strong wintergreen flavor better than the McCormick, but neither holds a candle to Virgil's.

I currently have some Cola, Root Beer, and other flavors of extracts on order with a couple of different places I have found from searching the forums here, but I am wondering if anyone has any hints and suggestions for sweetening with artificial sweeteners. They definitely aren't my first choice and there is just something unAmerican about sugar free root beer in my opinion, but I am a peacekeeper right now

One nice thing about having the SodaStream is after we get off of this diet I can make some home made soda using cane sugar rather than the high fructose corn syrup. I am looking forward to that!

Since you're using carbonated water to mix with the syrup, you can use any sort of sweetner you want because you're also not worried about fermentation.

Really, you're just looking for the amount of sweetner you want to use and you can even adjust it later. Is your cola not sweet enough in the glass? Add a pinch of sucralose, xylitol or stevia directly to the glass. The worst things that will happen is that it's too sweet, or you lose a bit of carbonation. (Probably wouldn't want to do it directly to the bottle though. Nucleation points + carbonated bev + restricted exit= pressure= soda fountains hitting the ceiling)

I have some syrups using sugar, but othertimes, I'll just add a few drops of unsweetened extract and stevia in varying amounts till it's however sweet I want cause I'm too lazy to try mixing up a batch and I'm allergic to sucralose.

Thanks Kevin. I just wasn't sure if there were additional steps to take for flavoring. I guess I will have a better idea when i can mix various extracts with sugar to see if the taste I don't like has to do with the recipe or the sweetener.

I haven't used the soda stream, but have found lemon/lime flavors cover the sweetener taste a lot.

I am definitely finding that some flavors work better with artificial sweeteners.

Lemon and lime mixes have worked well. Root beer has worked well. Raspberry and Strawberry worked okay.

I haven't been impressed with cream soda or cola so far. But I may just have my mixtures wrong. I just obtained the cola and cream soda extracts and there weren't any instructions for making a soda stream style syrup, so I am just guesstimating.