A friend recently shared with me a website he found all about Premium Bottled Water. The owner of the site has a PhD in Food Anthropology and contends that not all waters are equal.
So I pointed my browser to his site and read on to learn about the characteristics of "fine water". According to the site the following list represents the differences in taste found in water, Balance™ (carbonation), Virginality™ (nitrate), Minerality™ (tds), Orientation™ (pH), Hardness (Ca & Mg), and Vintage (age).
Sounds more like a wine list than a water resource, but what really blew me away was the price for these premium quality bottled waters. With names like Blue Republic, Island Ice and Etrusca, these exotic waters are bottled all over the world from "natural" springs and the crystal clear waters of hidden lakes.
And this is why you should pay almost $4 a bottle to drink them. Really? Did I read that right? One brand sold a case of twelve 1 liter water bottles for $40. That's a little more than 3 gallons of water for $40. Other premium brands do not even offer a price online and instead ask the customer to call for a price.
Supposedly we should desire these expensive brands for their superior taste and quality. Tap water could not possibly taste as good, right? Think again. The thing that often causes tap water to have a bad after taste is the presence of impurities in the water. A simple water filter on your tap will remove these contaminants and provide you with great tasting water for a fraction of the cost of bottled water.
I personally use a BRITA faucet filter and find that the improvement in the taste of my tap water is great. Plus the low cost of the replacement filter means I am only paying about $0.19 per gallon of drinking water.
