We’ve previously reviewed the Soda Club sparkling water maker. For literally $.20 a one liter bottle, versus $1.5 for Pelligrino, you can have sparkling water at home without carting bottles back and forth to the store. If there were any complaints about the Soda Club maker, it would only be that the plastic bottles weren’t elegant enough to bring to the table. Now, Soda Club has the “Penguin,” which carbonates water in glass bottles rather than plastic. The bottles are a fairly nice design with a subtle penguin logo that could be mistaken for a European crest. No one ever has to know that you make your sparkling water at home. The Soda Club’s big promise is also...

At our house, we don’t drink a lot of Coke or Sprite. The kids know that they can really only get these as an ingredient in a Shirley Temple (or Roy Rogers for my boy) when we’re out for a fancy dinner. The only carbonated drinks they get at home are Root Beer on random pizza nights and Pellegrino poured into their juice when we’re having people over for dinner. An unintentional benefit of keeping all these sugary drinks out of the house is fewer glass bottles to lug up the double staircase of our San Francisco Victorian. And, we have that many fewer bottles to toss in the trash or send to recyclying. The other night though, we saw a no-guilt and no heavy lifting solution to...