Besides beer, one of our favorite drinks to have on tap at all times is sparkling water. Its great for those hot summer days, and perfect for serving at dinner parties.
Over the last couple years we have been experimenting with adding flavors to our sparkling / bubble water, like grapefruit and lemon rind. Adding citrus fruit juice and rind to your water give it such a refreshing twist to a boring every day drinking water.
But even more recently we discovered essential oils, and found out that they actually taste amazing when diluted in water. Just a tiny amount of essential oil added to your water gives you amazing, all natural fruit flavor, and has zero calories! Yeah yeah, bubble water should have zero calories, we know, but what we were most impressed with was the taste. These oils give you such an amazing, all natural flavor. Our first sip of home made sparkling water with essential oils tasted like we had spent hours extracting the oils and zest from the fruit! But really we only spent a few second putting drops of this citrus oil into our water.
Making Home Made Sparkling Water with Essential Oils
Step 1: Select what flavor sparkling water you would like to make by picking up a vial of essential oil. Pretty much anything citrus will be amazing. We like to do combinations some times even (like lemon and lime oils mixed), but this time we just made Lime Flavored Sparkling Water.
Step 2: Fill your clean and sanitized keg (or Soda Carbonating Kit Bottle if you are doing smaller batches) with VERY COLD filtered drinking water. Having the water cold is key to getting a quick and good carbonation in your sparkling water.
Step 3: Add desired amount of Lime essential Oil to your keg or carbonating bottle. For a 5 Gallon keg we do about 20-30 drops. In a 2-liter bottle you only need a couple drops. This stuff goes a long way!
Step 4: Put the lid on the keg and connect your CO2 Gas line to the keg.
Step 5: Set the pressure to about 30PSI and purge out some of the oxygen in the keg by pulling the pressure relief valve a couple times. Then lay the keg on its side and shake for about 5 minutes or so to really force the CO2 into the liquid.
Step 6: Place your keg of essential oil bubble water in your fridge and keep the pressure set to around 30PSI to continue to carbonate and connect your liquid line to your keg. We leave our pressure at 30 PSI for the life of the keg to maintain good carbonation.
Step 7: Enjoy! Serve up a glass of ice cold, lime flavored sparkling water to enjoy on a hot day, dinner party, or even mix with a little vodka to make a vodka spritzer! Note when serving at this high of pressure the sparkling water will come out very fast. It will bubble up on the glass, but the bubbles will subside very quickly (not like a glass of beer). So we typically just fill our glass in a few short bursts.
Hope you enjoy this way of making home made flavored sparkling water as much as we do. And feel free to share your favorite flavor of essential oil sparkling water below!
Do you do or add anything to ensure the oil actually mixes with the water and doesn’t rest on top?