“Carbonating at Home with Improvised Equipment and Soda Fountains” by Richard J. Kinch changed the quality of my life and made my Hungarian girlfriend very, very happy.  

The paper is artfully written like a respectable 1700’s scientific treatise complete with multiple titles.  It is remarkably complete, informative, and even poetically insightful.  This beautiful passage below is my favorite:    

You might wonder if PET soda bottles are strong and durable enough to take all this freezing, whacking, squeezing, and pressure cycling over and over again. These bottles are amazingly strong and durable. They must have a working pressure far above the 50 psi I have been using to carbonate; a warm bottle of store-bought soda dropped on the floor will develop far over 100 psi of pressure, and they must be designed to take that kind of situation. I have abused these bottles through hundreds of carbonation cycles without developing so much as a pinhole leak. They do get a bit wrinkly and creased after a while. But of course they are easily replaced with “new” ones. If we could send a few back through time to the ancients, these bottles would be considered precious jewels reserved for the king’s use. But we just discard them like so much useless trash. I am not a nutty environmentalist, but I am perplexed by the irony of such exquisitely engineered vessels being used for only 1/1000 of their potential lifetime.