It’s stupid, but I just can’t bring myself to drink the tap water here in Seattle. Or anywhere else for that matter. The various Brita filter crap doesn’t seem to help.
Yet Evian takes like candy.
Am I hallucinating this all? Is there any way to make the tap palatable?
You might want to do a little homework before condemning tap water. I don’t know what the water standards are like in your state but where I live the tap water is actually held to a higher standard of cleanliness than the standards the bottled water companies are held to.
Of course there’s no standards on taste and whatnot, I’m betting a lot of the taste probably comes from harmless things like trace minerals that the cleanliness standards don’t govern.
Well, they’re shit in Vegas. Our water is harder than my penis and twice as bitter.
Oh, I know the tap is immaculate for health, it just tastes horrid.
Where I live in Brooklyn, NY the water has a distinct taste of chlorine. In fact, when you run the tap for a bit you can smell it.
I’m sure that it’s just fine, but I drink and cook with bottled.
Water taste has a lot to do with mineral content. When I lived in downtown Sacramento, we got snowmelt pretty much right out of the river (most of the year they just added alum to it to get out the particulate matter, then put it right into the system). It was fantastic, better than bottled water.
Where I live now gets a mix of very hard deep well water and water from the California Aqueduct (which is so high in sodium due to evaporation that it is illegal to discharge it into the local river). It tastes like crap, so I buy bottled water that has been through a reverse-osmosis process. Aquafina around here, for example, is actually City of Riverside tap water, but run through Pepsi’s reverse osmosis plant. I don’t care about brand, just the process. I don’t like Dasani because Coca-Cola adds minerals back in (like most stuff labeled “Drinking Water”), which makes it taste crappy to me.
Also, if you have really old or decaying pipes, that can add crap to it that negatively affects taste.
I actually find that tap water tastes better than bottled.
Apparently all the kids these days have bad teeth because their all drinking bottled water and not getting any of the (small amounts of) fluoride from tap water.
I use a Pur filter on my kitchen faucet and keep a pitcher of filtered water out on the counter — chlorine dissipates into the air. If you put unfiltered Chicago tap water into a humidifier, you will coat your home with white mineral dust.
Worst tap water in the US: eastern Iowa. They have to chlorinate the bejeebers out of it because of the massive hog farms all around there (manure runoff into the groundwater).
When I moved to vegas years ago I was used to the clean clear water out of my parent’s well. I started drinking vegas water out of the tap, it gave me diarhea and of course that made me more thirsty so I drank more water. Took me a few days to realise what was going on and stop the downward water dehydration spiral.
I didn’t know that any place outside of India had tap water that could make you that sick.
Actually, taste isn’t about minerals…well, if there are too many, it tastes bad. But the amount of oxygen in the water gives it real flavor. My tap water is fantastic. I often have water with meals here because it’s so freakin good. And no, I am not being sarcastic. I do drink bottled water when teaching or traveling (it’s in those handy bottles!), but never at home. The tap water is actually better.
Where is that?
Because where I live in Brooklyn, NY, the tap water is actually pretty good. Nice clean, refreshing taste. It was far far better than the sodden heavy bitter piss that came out of my Manhattan apartment.
It’s called Kings County. Just off Ocean Parkway between Cortelyou Road and Avenue C.
Yeah, the flavor of tap what is simply a function of where that water comes from. The water where I live comes directly from a mountain tributary to the Willamette river. Crystal runoff up in the mountains that I have on occasion sampled direct from the river during hiking trips. It’s almost as good when it reaches my apartment. Contrast that with Wilsonville about 30 miles north of here. Their tap water comes directly from the Willamette river and no matter how much they treat it, you can taste the pollution. Go up to Portland, though, and the water’s really good again. Not as good as here in Salem, but still really good.
Ew. Don’t drink water in the wild, Brad. You put yourself at risk for protozoa and other parasitic infections.
I grew up on tap water so good that the town could probably bottle and sell it. Where I live now has decent tap water if it’s run through a Brita. Every once in a while I am a sucker for some welsh bottled water they have at the local store… there’s something really tasty about it.
Perhaps that tasty protozoa? Or a fine parasite?
It is, and it doesn’t. Well, maybe people who can’t appreciate good mineral water might call the taste “bad” but we’ve got a wide variety of heavily mineralised water from natural springs, and the taste definitely differs depending on the mineral content. My favorite is Fachinger which has a nice smooth salty taste.
I grew up in rural Montana and drank well water so when I moved to Seattle I found the tap water to be horid. However, Brita seems to make it fine to me. Weird.
What’s the point of hiking if you can’t feed the protozoa?
And they often do. It’s a joke how most if not all bottled water comes from exactly the same water reservoir as the town they’re bottled in (the Bullshit episode on this is quite funny).
Of course it makes sense if they’re bottled ion a small town with clean water like yours and exported to some shithole - but most of the time bottled water is a great great scam.
Me, I live in one of the countries where tapwater is cleaner than bottled and no chlorine is added, so the taste is good too (and I’d dare anyone to a blind test between various bottled water and clean tap water - it’s not wine and you snobs can’t taste the difference, so stop pretending). Ok, it’s convenient and cooled - but that’s the only reason to buy bottled water here.
And still bottled water sell like mad here too.