Jokes aside this is seriously impressive and makes me want to try and see if I can register them as unique enough. I certainly can taste different water bottle brands difference, but going from that to saying what’s good for x recipe is pretty next level
"""You’re not fighting the water or compensating for it; you’re working with a clean, neutral base that lets the coffee do the talking."""
The author is I think letting something else than coffee do the talking here. Have a brew maybe?
It might be, but it's also a sentence I might have read on any "choosing water for coffee" article of the last twenty years.
What we are seeing is not a decrease of quality writing but a compression of the large span of poor writing into a much more narrow mediocre range.
As a homebrewer, the standard approach is to look up / measure your tap water's profile, buy a few grams of additives (gypsum, calcium chloride, epsom salt, etc), and add them to compensate. But if you don't have your water profile handy, this could work in a pinch. 5 gallons of bottled water is an expensive approach, though!
This isn't bound to AI-use, even if you scrape factual content, a million and one things can go wrong, so having some kind of checkbox that says "Yes, I have reviewed and verified it is one hundred and fifty percent certainly confidently true, a fact even" forces you to verify what you're publishing is true.
A POC is only 10% of the way.
Why x Matters: is absolutely a tell
It's a thing, just a very niche thing. There are fancy walter filtration systems that put minerals back so it's more controlled. I suppose this is useful when you're living in America, where everything is chlorined to death.
I presume a big contributor to that is familiarity. But still, it makes me curious how that water compares to other sources. I'd be curious to see the water I grew up with broken down on a site like this.
You have to carbonate because (at least in my case) the amount of minerals per liter is too much for them to dissolve on their own, but they generally stay in suspension even when degassed
I make about a 40x concentrate (500ml makes 20 liters), I put about 15-20ml in an ~800ml bottle. Make sure you shake it vigorously immediately before use, like literally shake right until you pop the cap off and pour it, or you'll get weak water early and strong water later (it won't dissolve)
Recipe is something in this ballpark, no need to be especially precious about it, you won't taste minor variation:
35g CaCO3
15g MgCO3
15g NaHCO3
2g Epsom Salt (MgSO4+7H2O)
1g Salt (NaCl)
1g Lite Salt (NaCl + KCl)
It's better to use as cold water as you can get, carbonates are inversely soluble in water based on temperature, so just above freezing (~2C or ~35F), and it'll hold more carbonation.
lol getting that fresh water
also bottles have the mineral composition labeled, varies for tap water
And some cannot be convinced that tap water could be safe to drink. I know a few people who exclusively drink glass-bottled water, because they fear microplastics on top of that.
It's a cultural thing, mostly. Not everyone has the luxury of, like me, growing up in a place like Munich where the water source is clean and pristine needing very little treatment. In many places water has to be chlorinated or, in the worst cases, is contaminated with gases from fracking to the tune you can set it ablaze [1]. Or it's contaminated with lead [2], PFAS [3] and pharmaceuticals [4]. And that's just "rich world problems" - people who grew up in developing countries or even in extremely rural areas of Western countries who grew up with water unsafe to drink before boiling it off will be even more skeptical.
The value proposition of many a "branded bottle water" is that the water sources they use are so old and deep that no human activity can have contaminated them.
P.S.: And that's before thinking about if the hot water supply in your home has its tank flushed and cleaned and the anodes serviced regularly... neglect your hot water installation and you'll get disgusting shit like [5].
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/scientific-study-links-fl...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24685...
[3] https://environment.ec.europa.eu/news/new-eu-rules-limit-pfa...
[4] https://www.usgs.gov/water-science-school/science/pharmaceut...
I'm Brazilian. We learn early in school that water must always be boiled or filtered before drinking. I'd feel very uncomfortable drinking water directly from plumbing, no matter how much some people say it's safe.
Every place here (and I don't say that lightly, I don't think I've ever seen an exception) has either a water filter connected to the plumbing (for unlimited on-demand filtered water), or at least a separate standalone filter, or sometimes a drinking fountain which gets its water from large mineral water containers (and it's normally real mineral water bottled from real mineral springs, not that nonsense that is adding minerals to tap water and saying it's mineral water).
Edit: and IIRC, there's a law that bars and restaurants must provide filtered tap water to their clients without extra cost when requested. Even the law requires filtering.
It's still good to get rid of that dirt. If you live near a main street or some other polluted place, it can become harmful. But it's not that much of a change.
Your recommendation may be valid for large volumes long term (like the aquarium or brewing at craft beer scale), but for all the other uses not.
Bottled water is usually just a convenience factor of "I can take x bottles from this pack wherever at once on demand, or even grab them full of water I like while not at home".
I've heard of systems that attempt to just let the brine diffuse back through the source water system rather than dumping it. But, I think this is against code in any modern, thoughtful regulatory environment. You normally want explicit back-flow prevention to reduce the chance of contamination of the water system by end users.
The osmosis machines consume a lot of water which is quite expensive and problematic when we have droughts. I buy the cheap bottled water though, not Evian.
Personally, I've been tempted to bring water from my parent's house, because their water is loaded with copper, which makes it very hard for ick to spread. Unfortunately, my aquarium is far too large to make it practical to move water from their house to mine.
Then, perhaps, your local tap water is already close enough to that reference that you might not need to bother.
E.g. with tea I'm wondering if I'm bottlenecked by the quality of tea, water, my technique or taste buds. So I'd buy some expensive reference water at least once just to eliminate one of variables.
Trying it out is still on my list; it's not easy to get food-grade necessary salts...
I drink DI RO water <1 ppm TDS.
I love the taste of Fiji water, but I hate buying bottled water. I've often wished I could make tap water taste like Fiji water.
This doesnt work. The water will taste nothing like the original desired base water profile. When water is carbonated the ph will drop (from say 7 to 4) and even when decarbed carbonic acid is still present from the process. In order to get the desired flavors just a ro water filter and build it back up to the desired profile.
Coffee heads have told me to use freshly heated and not reboiled water for that reason.
Uh... moderately? Lol I'd disagree here. Anything touched by Munich tap water will have issues with limescale residue...
> Edinburgh water is hard, with notably high sulphate
No it isn't. Where did they get this?
> Calcium 100 mg/L Magnesium 20 mg/L Hardness: 332 as CaCO₃
Actual data: https://www.scottishwater.co.uk/-/media/scottishwater/docume...
has five sampling points at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glencorse_Reservoir (Edinburgh's drinking water supply)
Zone Ca mg/l Mg mg/l CaCO₃ mg/l Hardness
Glencorse A 10.04 1.31 30.44 Soft
Glencorse B 10.36 1.36 31.44 Soft
Glencorse C 10.04 1.35 30.60 Soft
Glencorse D 10.16 1.35 30.90 Soft
Glencorse E 10.06 1.34 30.61 Soft
How can I trust any other page on the site, if I check one and it's completely wrong?
It was a good concept. Somebody should make it.