Water Source You Use
What do you use for your water source? I get the feeling that most of us don’t live by a trickling spring or babbling brook, so we have to make due with less tranquil solutions. I live in Philadelphia, so I filter what we call Schuylkill Punch, aka: tap water, through a Brita filter.
What do you folks do?
Tap water through a Berkey filter, although my favorite has to be when I take tea hiking or backpacking and can filter high mountain glacier water straight from the source.
In Yunnan, local spring water. In Canada, Dasani. I tried at least 10 different spring waters while visiting, but my tea never tasted quite right. Some were better than others, but Dasani was the closest @ 35ppm total dissolved solids. The other waters between 30-50ppm were decent too though, but my teas didn’t quite taste as good as they do at home. Anything 100+ppm interfered way too much and the fragrance and complexity of the tea got quite muddied, IMO. Maybe it’s partly the comfort and setting. Out of the tap waters I tried (not an option in China), Vancouver’s was easily the best.
Tap water, I’m not paying big corporations money to get something as basic as clean water when I can have it for free.
Nestle in particular has a bad reputation in regards to the environmental and social impacts it has here and abroad.
We have the generic Lowes brand faucet filter for out tap water at home, and I have a brita pitcher at work. I think the brita is better after a number of pitchers (the fresh filter makes the water very ‘bright’).
I remember the water had a lot of lime when I stayed in central PA. Tap is alright in California though.
Tap water filtered through a Pur filter. Without it, I can always detect chlorine in my cup.
Related issue: Re-boiled water… In order to keep my water at boiling temperature my kettle will reheat it when it drops to 200F or a similar cycling process with lower temperatures. Is this what people mean when they say re-boiled water? Or do they just mean water from yesterday that is left in the kettle? (which I’m also guilty of on occasion.) Can you tell a difference?
It is generally said that reboiled water will make more bland tea. However, I have sometimes reboiled my kettle and generally can’t tell the difference. Some people say they can.
Overboiled water does tend to taste flat. That can happen if you leave your kettle on the stove too long.
The nice thing about an electric kettle is it automatically shuts off as soon as the water comes to a boil thus preventing overboiling. I can’t taste any difference either when the kettle is reboiled. Usually though I try to catch it before it comes to a full boil because I steep most of my teas at below boiling.
I almost always steep my tea below recommended temperature, seldom to boiling, unless I’m drinking an herbal. I guess the low temp habit serves us well!
It indeed means re-boiling already boiled water. It has a less noticeable effect on pure distilled water. However, for other types of water that contain minerals, reboiling does change the chemical composition and therefore affect the taste.
Water contains dissolved oxygen, separate from the H2O molecule. Why over boiling flattens water is because the dissolved oxygen is being carried away in the steam. Even just keeping water near boiling for a prolonged period will cause this. From my experience flavor isn’t the biggest loss, but rather the texture of the tea is what suffors the most.
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