The oddest experience for me is discussing different types of bottled water with friends as though the individual types of water were different flavours of soft drink. I’ve seen the episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! With the couple in the restaurant buying fancy bottles of water from their “water sommelier” and swearing blind they can taste the difference between each bottle based on the story that was told to them before consuming the water.
There exist in this world a breed of people who consider themselves to be water connoisseurs. With no formal training or professional expertise they profess to be able to discern the region of where waters were sourced, what minerals are in the water, and many other characteristics of various bottled waters from around the world. Professional and educated wine tasters have built up a large vocabulary of terminology to describe wines and the water connoisseurs have appropriated much of this vocabulary for their own ends.
I decided that I’d go to a professional for more information and as I come from a large family there is always at least one person somewhere within my network of relations who are trained, teach or practice whatever it is I need to know.
I didn’t have to go far either, I called up my brother Robert who in his career as a professor of restaurant studies at Clarendon College in England has taught restaurant techniques all over the world, is a professional wine taster and has had extensive experience with sourcing and tasting wines and waters for various restaurants throughout England and Wales.
I asked Robert to give me the 101 info dump on water tasting, some of the terminology used and what are the controversies with water tasting. Inside of 20 minutes of questioning I pretty much was of the same opinion as he was which I’ll get to in a minute.
Terroir, minerality, sparkle, effervescence, mouthfeel (love that one), texture, boldness, crispness and many others are all used to describe the supposed myriad characteristics of bottled waters, especially mineral waters, both carbonated and still.
Terroir, a French loanword that allegedly means the unique characteristics of a region imparted to wine. This terminology has also been borrowed by the water crowd to describe the same thing in sparkling waters or waters extracted from natural aquifiers. Now here’s a thing, in wine tasting circles there is no one absolute definition of terroir. When a group of experts and professionals are unable to universally agree on the definition of a word you can basically exchange whatever someone else thinks the word means with “reading the entrails of animals.” If you cannot objectively measure it your opinion amounts to nothing more than flimflam and bullshit.
The most amusing activity of water connoisseurs I was informed about was the need to let the bottled water breathe. When you first open a bottle of water it needs to stand on the table for up to 20 minutes so that it can aerate to develop a full flavour and body.
I’ve got news for you, water is not volatile; it doesn’t react with the surface air over such a small area of the neck of the bottle preventing any significant breathing from taking place.
I think all this terminology about the characteristics of bottled water is just plain (not sparkling or still) nonsense, I am of the opinion that most people cannot actually taste the difference between various bottled waters. However, after you have cleaned your palate of all the artificially produced junk food you put in your mouth and drunk a reasonably good brand of bottled water for a period of time you’d swear blind you can.
And this idea to do a blind taste test has been percolating in my head for at least three years, ever since I made the switch from soda to mineral water in fact.
I measure and test pretty much everything in my life once I become consciously aware enough to ask a question about it – and I have a lot of questions – so I decided to put my money where my mouth is in a blind taste test of bottled waters.
The test protocol and taste test was presided over by my Director of Business Development who happens to have the better part of two decades conducting such professional taste tests in large market research companies so you can be sure it was a reasonably thorough test.
The goal of the taste test was to see if I, who have tasted a lot of waters to find the ones I like, could identify individual bottled waters, could correctly identify a group of waters and place the glass of water with the correct brand, and whether I could match up identical waters together.
We tested two groups of water separately, sparkling and still. Here are the waters that were tested in no particular order:
Still Waters
- Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water
- Dasani Purified Water
- Aquafina Pure Water
- Fiji Natural Artesian Water
- Bristol Farms Drinking Water
- Evian Natural Spring Water
- Tap water run through a filter installed in the refrigerator
- Tap water that has not been filtered
Sparkling Waters
- Perrier Sparkling Mineral Water
- San Pellegrino Sparkling Mineral Water
- Arrowhead Sparkling Mountain Spring
- Crystal Geyser Sparkling Water
All of the waters were taste tested at room temperature and two people took the test, my girlfriend and me.
My girlfriend isn’t a “water aficionado,” she likes drinking Fiji but will drink just about any bottled water, “whatever’s available” in her own words.
Okay so let’s get to the first taste test. My girlfriend did the first test. She was unable to identify a single still water or tell any of them apart. She was unable to pick out the Fiji water, her self-professed favourite, from a field of eight different still waters. She was also unable to identify the Fiji water when the number of options was reduced to three.
Her answers were randomly scattered enough that they amounted to no better than blind guessing. She incorrectly identified two waters (Dasani and Aquafina) as duplicates of each other in one of the tests. She identified the tap water and filtered tap water as the budget brand water (Dasani and Bristol Farms) and identified two of the higher end brands (Fiji and Evian) as the tap water.
The sparkling test was halted and the results thrown away after she stated that she couldn’t tell the difference between any of the four brands that she tried.
When I did the taste test I was unable to identify any of the still waters uniquely. Again, the results of my attempt at the test were no better than random chance. I was unable to correctly identify even a single individual water. I misidentified at least three of the still waters as duplicates of each other in two separate tests.
When I visit a restaurant I order a Perrier to drink. If I am informed by the waiter that Perrier isn’t available but they have San Pellegrino or VOS I wrinkle my nose a little and then reluctantly order one of the alternatives.
Oh damn! I’ve become a water snob!
In the sparkling water test I performed marginally better. I was able to distinguish between the Perrier and the San Pellegrino 66% of the time. I was able to distinguish between San Pellegrino and Crystal Geyser 66% of the time. But I was unable to distinguish between San Pellegrino and Arrowhead Sparkling Mineral Water. I was also unable to correctly distinguish between any of the sparkling waters when testing three different waters.
I am sure that there are professional tasters who can distinguish between individual waters but for the average man in the street, myself included, our taste buds just aren’t up to the task no matter how cleansed and discerning we think we’ve become.
I know these tests were conducted with a very small population sample but the tests were rigorous and professional. We had saltine crackers and everything! What I found amusing was the ninth type of still water on hand to drink in between each sip of test water to clean out the palate. I’m an accomplished amateur wine taster and can also identify the region that a particular coffee was grown in. My taste buds are in top notch form.
The bottle, the colour, the shape, the brand, the name, it all alters the perception of how the water tastes or should taste. Everything about a bottle of mineral water, from the design of the label to the hiss that the carbon makes when escaping the bottle is geared to changing your perception.
If you would like to perform these taste tests yourself and want the protocol we devised please contact me, I’d be happy to send it to you so long as you agree to share your results. I’ll update this article with any new results sent in by readers so that we can keep track of them.
Ice Made of Tap Water
Putting ice made of tap water, filtered or not, in your glass of carefully selected bottled water? You fool! Don’t you know your adulterating your expensive bottled water with that dirty, common municipal water!? Your glass of expensive bubbly will lose the mouthfeel and boldness you’ve come to so expect.
Yeah, okay, so let’s return to reality for a second and just say that your expensive bottled water would need to be served steaming hot and poured over an entire glass of ice for the ice to contaminate the water in any way. Here, I’ll prove it:
I measured the melt rate of ice under various conditions – no water, refrigerator chilled bottled water (20 degrees Celsius), room temperature bottled water (74 degrees Celsius), boiling bottled water – by performing a couple of kitchen-based scientific experiments.
All of the glasses were of uniform size, shape and temperature. The glasses held 300 millilitres (approximately 10 fluid ounces) of water to the lip. I filled each glass with precisely six ice cubes of uniform shape and size. The total amount of ice in each equated to precisely 90 millilitres (approximately 3 fluid ounces). I weighed each ice cube to ensure that they were within 1% of each other. I filled each glass with precisely the same amount of water from the exact same bottle. I performed the experiment twice, once with Dasani Purified Water and again with Evian Natural Artesian Water.
I ensured that the room remained at a uniform temperature throughout the experiment and placed the glasses on an insulated neoprene pad to prevent the temperature take up of the work surface from affecting the experiment.
I measured the time from when the ice cubes entered the glass to when the ice cubes completely melted away, i.e. completely melted in to the surrounding liquid.
I also measured the rate at which ice cubes melted under the various conditions by creating glasses of iced water under identical conditions to each other and every minute pouring away the water and weighing the ice and then letting the ice melt completely in to a brand new glass and accurately measuring the quantity of water remaining.
My conclusions based on all this circumstantial evidence is that room temperature water served over ice made from plain old tap water rather than ridiculously expensive premium ice (and you thought that bottled water was overpriced, you ain’t seen the prices on premium ice) and then delicately sipped will not alter the flavour of the water in any discernible way that matters.
Assuming that it takes five minutes to consume the 175 millilitres (approximately 6 fluid ounces) of room temperature bottled water occupying the glass the average contamination from the ice will be approximately 1.4% of the ice or 1.3 millilitres (approximately 0.044 of a fluid ounce).
With the chilled bottled water the evaporation rate of the ice was much lower and in that same five minute window the contamination in to the water from the ice will be approximately 0.9% of the ice or 0.79 millilitres (approximately 0.027 of a fluid ounce).
By the time you have delicately sipped away the water in a glass with ice and room temperature water the amount of water evaporated away from the surface of the ice cubes isn’t enough to “contaminate” your precious drinky poo. The tap water that the ice was made from would have to be heavily contaminated or the filtration system polluted for it to adversely affect your initial glass of water.
Pouring more water in to the glass after the initial glass has been drunk will of course introduce more tap water from the melted ice.
If you’ve drunk bottled water over ice and thought the ice might have altered the taste, try looking for soap residue on the glass first.
I doubt that anyone not trained in determining the various subtle characteristics of bottled waters could accurately distinguish between them. Anything discussed about bottled waters by pretty much anyone can safely be placed in to the same snake oil that is promoted by audiophiles.
My only response to all this water logged nonsense is if you drink bottled water, which brand you prefer, and I have a preference for Perrier water, that you enjoy your particular tipple to the fullest without worrying about nose, boldness or mouthfeel.
Revel in your choice of bottled water.
Just don’t believe the hyperbole and the bullshit.
