DrewCarey82,
You're a man after my own heart. Also makes it easier to justify to the missus spending all that time brewing when she is getting something out of it.
On a trip to Perth, at a brewery in Margaret River my wife tasted an alcoholic creaming soda and has been at me to brew her one of those.
I've been experimenting with this for a couple of months now.
I initially made a test brew (a 2 litre coke bottle with an airlock) with the recommended soda stream 'cream soda' cordial dose and enough sugar to have an SG of around 1040. I used a spare coopers kit yeat I had lying around. For some reason this seemed to take an age to ferment (like 3 - 4 weeks) and took several rousings (read: shook the bottle !). But when it finished, the results seemed acceptable (well the actual responses from my wife and my sister were 'Yep I'll have a case of this thanks')
Next I tried the same but with a standard cordial, but this never seemed to ferment, no matter what I did. There are a few possible reasons for this
* Maybe there is some preservative or something in the cordial that inhibited the yeast from growing.
* Normal cordial is a '1 in 4' recommended dose where as the soda stream stuff is '1 in 23', which meant that I didn't get to add much sugar. If the sugars in the cordial are not fermentable, then this could also be the problem.
Anyway, just before XMAS then just made a 23L batch of 'alcoholic water' - just water, sugar and yeast (another coopers kit yeast). Again this heaps longer than my beers to ferment, but once it did, I bulk primed the batch and bottled it, adding an appropriate dose of cordial to each bottle. This allowed me to try a range of different flavours and brands. So far I've only tried the soda stream based ones - I can recommend the cranberry one, if you like that sort of thing. I will try one of the normal cordial ones tonight to see if secondary fermentation continued in the bottle and let you know.
Having said that, there is a bit of an underlying funny taste (to me it was like popcorn kernals!) which I have attributed to the cheap coopers yeast. Next time, I will look at lashing out on a champagne or wine yeast that might end up with a cleaner taste.
cheers