It's generally accepted amongst knowledgeable tea drinkers that one should use bottled water for tea if one's regular tap water doesn't taste good. Mine doesn't and since I'm getting tired of the expense and effort required to keep my tea habit in decent-tasting water, I've been looking at filtering systems and read in the r.f.d.t. FAQ that bottled water is preferred over filtered water unless it's drawn and immediately put on to boil and not left sitting in a filtering carafe or pitcher.
My question is: What's the difference? Don't spring waters pass through some sort of filtration or some sort of process that removes oxygen as much as home filtering does before they're bottled? Even if not, both bottle and carafe are made of plastic and will affect the taste depending on the quality of plastic used and bottled water sits in it's plastic bottle a
*whole* lot longer than home-filtered water sits in a pitcher waiting to be used.
As far as I know, the reason to use bottled spring water isn't the oxygen content, but rather the mineral content. Some say it enhances the flavor of the tea. Me personally? I'm happy with a Brita filter on my faucet, which is relatively cheap when you think about how much good water you get from each filter.
That's for sure, but really I've never tried a variety of bottled waters with my tea so if there is one out there that makes my tea better, I haven't tried it yet. Another strike against bottled water for me is that in every one I've tasted I can definitely taste the plastic in it, so much so that it makes me nauseous. But who knows, maybe I had what would be considered bad bottled water. Looking forward to hearing what others have to say on the subject.
I think as home filtration technologies get better, the gap between bottled and filtered tap narrows. Still, the use of tap water as a general guideline is difficult to advise because the quality of the water largely depends on what particular processing has been done on it in your area. For example, when I lived in Orlando, the tap had a really nasty egg smell to it which was only partly attenuated by my Brita carbon filter.
Still, I think your point is a good one, that filtered tap is an option worth exploring, since it is potentially much cheaper, and if you are lucky, even better than the majority of bottled water available out there.
Which reminds me...the information about processing isn't readily available to everyone. Also, I visited Ft. Worth a couple of years ago and a friend apologized for their water. I didn't have the heart to tell her that it's sold in bottles up here >:o.
I can use the tap water nearly imediatly as it passes through the tap filter as fast as usual, and it takes 2 minutes to get it though the Brita. It's not really left sitting.
I agree if it's a plastic bottle, I find the water smells of plastic when you open it, so when I have no other choice (than bottled water) I pour the water in a glass half an hour before drinking it. Mineral water in glass bottle is great, but not very convenient to get at home. The Brita pitcher doesn't give taste to the water. You can also make your own : place a carbon (I get them at the grocer's in Japan and was told aquarium shops retailed them in other countries) in a glass pitcher. For the oxygenation, isn't that possible to do it by whipping the water or pouring it back and forth a few times (pouring from very high like when serving mint tea) before boiling it ?
I'm not sure that's an improvement. I filter my water to REMOVE the excess minerals that dissolve from the nasty old pipework.
To be perfectly honest, I've gotten downright tasty cups of tea using distilled water. (Camping with friends, the gal who always agreed to bring the bottled water always bought distilled).
Most experienced aquarists would probably argue that whipping the water would actually reduce the amount of oxygen in the water, by forcing out what is already inside it.
The apparatus that you see creating a constant stream of tiny air bubbles in many aquariums is really more of an entertainment device than anything else. Experiments in germany found that passing bubbles through water caused no appreciable increase in oxygenation except where the bubbles broke on the surface.
The currently accepted dogma on oxygenation among aquarists is that surface area and the relentless forces of gravity and atmospheric pressure are the only reliable means of getting oxygen into the water so that your fish may live and breathe.
Agitation mainly serves to release gasses from water, as evidenced by the bubbles coughed up by my sealed canister filtration system. The water comes from the bottom of the tank and bubbles form around the impeller inside the canister. Had to get there somehow.
The 'air stone' type bubbler achieves an increase in surface area by breaking bubbles on the surface - this forces some water up and some down and thus creates much more surface area.
Unfortunately, water at a given temperature can only absorb a particular amount of oxygen, and the bubbler does very little to circulate new water to the surface, unless you are also using some sort of chimney system, and so called "riser tubes" have a tendency to be annoyingly loud.
Thus, the additional function of pump-type filters is to circulate water to the surface of the aquarium.
Now that you've got oxygen in the water, it turns out that the only appreciable factor in maintaining oxygenation is temperature. The warmer your water gets, the less oxygen it can absorb.
I bring all this up only because there has been a recent health fad with regard to oxygenated water - and there are actually companies that will sell you everything from "high oxygen" bottled water to little tablets that are supposed to increase the oxygen in your own water to a $500 blender that's supposed to somehow whip oxygen into your water, and it's all hooey. Or, since this is a tea discussion, stuff & nonsense.
Oxygen in drinking and tea-making water is a matter of conjecture, anecdotal evidence, fuzzy math, and hard-to-verify theories. Oxygenation in an aquarium is a life & death problem, verifiable by the survival of your pets.
As for myself, my drinking water is what they call "surface water" - which means I'm literally drinking purified street runoff.
What i get from the tap has three things in it that make tea tricky business.
1: Hydrocarbons and other petrochemicals
2: Aluminum sulfate (aka Alum) used as a precipitant by the water company
3: A whole lot of calcium
Carbon filtration deals with most of the petrochemicals, but not all of it. For the aluminum sulfate (which is found in many municipal water supplies), basically, for drinking water, my option is to let it stand. It will eventually precipitate out. Over time it forms small, flat, clear-white crystals on the bottom of my 'pur' dispenser. I'm not sure how to describe it, but they really don't resemble mineral scale. The distribution is far less regular, tending more toward individual spots of crystallization.
For drinking water, I find that if i use a carbon filter on the tap, I can still taste the bitterness of the aluminum sulfate and some of the nastiness of the petrochemicals. So I no longer use a tap filter and instead let my water run for a minute or so and then fill a 3 gallon pur dispenser which sits in the fridge.
After about 8 hours in the fridge, what i get out of the pur dispenser approaches the quality of the water that comes out of the tap at my parents house, which gets it's water from a well cut into limestone.
I use this water to make my tea. I find it does a really decent job. Much better, in fact, than the bottled water i use at work.
Theoretically, based on my experience as an aquarist, I'm going to guess that the water from my fridge - which is almost cold enough to freeze - is going to have more oxygen in it than it would if i'd let it sit on the counter at room temperature.
However, ice cubes made from water that's been in my refrigerated dispenser for a day or so are far more solid than ice cubes made from water straight from the on-tap filter, indicating that the majority of gasses in solution at the tap have since passed back out into the atmosphere.
There remains, of course, the boil.
It should be asked, if oxygen in the water is a major factor in tea steeping, how much oxygen stays in the water after being brought to a boil.
As far as minerals are concerned, water that has a lot of stuff in solution has less capacity as a solvent - it's going to draw less out of your leaves. Boiling does cause calcium for example to precipitate out, as evidenced by the scale buildup in your kettle.
There is some interesting reading on the subject of boiled vs. not boiled water in literature about russian tea making traditions, but I'm basically done here.
The problem is you don;'t know -what- is in the bottled water. And how long has it been sitting on the shelf? Why do we pay so much for stale old water tainted with plastic? I never touch bottled water, it's not particularly safe.
Cheers
Blippie
-- Ten minutes of this rain will do more good in half an hour than a fortnight of ordinary rain in a month.
Thanks for the long explanation. I have never tried to oxygenate water, so now I won't lost my time at that sport.
Many years ago, I've had a gold fish during nearly a year, in a sort of salad bowl full of tap water (changed 1 time a week). It died a week-end I was away. So I've taken my bowl to the next fish shop to get a new friend and they said : "No fish can survive more than 12 hours in that, you need a bigger aquarium, a bubble machine, a filter, never use our local tap water that is too this and too that, etc...". They had nothing I could afford with my 2$ per week of pocket money.
My local market has the equivalent of a big fancy Brita in the store. It's supplied with tap water, but then is run through sediment/activated charcoal/reverse-osmosis filters. The result is "almost" distilled, because the RO filter removes most of the minerals. The best part is that you bring your own jugs, so the water never stands around (in my case) more than a week. At $0.39/gallon, it's a steal.
I use it for all my cooking, drinking and tea. I've tried bottled spring water for tea, and I can't tell the difference; in fact, for some teas I think it's better.
Since it's to improve taste, they pro'lly only use the good-tasting ones.
Their 2-stage filter doesn't have the minerals and either filter fits into any of their faucet-mount products so people may choose whichever suits their taste.
Yes, I've found that distilled water tends to make a lighter/cleaner-tasting, more refreshing tea.
If we knew how they gauge the expiration date, we'd be able to tell.
Successful advertising campaigns?
Not even distilled? At least, with that, we know that it's *only* water (plus whatever makes it taste like the bottle it's in, if it does taste like plastic).
Yes, I've seen BYOBottle places here and if you use glass containers, you won't get any plastic taste, ever.
I figured a PUR faucet-mount including 1 filter from Wal-Mart would cost me $20 for a 2-stage or $27 - $40 for a 3-stage. Then, a 3-pack of 3-stage filters at $38 would run $0.13/gal.
I used to work at a company that provided free soft drinks and bottled water.
Initially, this was Evian. Nasty stuff, tastes brackish. It was pointed out by several - including myself and a french engineer in the states on an H1B visa - that importing water from france is absurd, and needlessly expensive, and that this part of the beverage budget could be better spent.
So they started buying flats of Dasani from the coke distributor instead. Dasani is reverse-osmosis water with a mineral syrup added. It's literally just a different bottle of stuff at the bottling company, since they are required by corporate to use RO water for everything.
Dasasni actually gives me heartburn, straight up. Something about the mineral mix they're using Aint Right. I actually find it undrinkable unless right on the edge of frozen.
I wondered out loud, if it might be a process issue. If, perhaps, something was supposed to be allowed to precipitate, or out-gas, or something.
One day i came in an found on my desk a sheet of paper with a Dasani logo indicating something like "this product requires resting period of three weeks" and bearing two dates, indicating that it had been delivered more than two weeks ahead of schedule. Co-worker said it was wrapped inside the top of the flats that were delivered that day, and he figured i'd be curious.
The municipal water in that complex is so bad that it actually caused a water purification system in the marketing department to rupture from excess scale buildup after about a year of use. After that, nobody bothered trying to drink the local water. It had been said that the water was so hard you could chip a tooth on it. Any water fixture that wasn't meticulously cared for got a thick crust of yellow scale after just a few weeks.
Dang! They never intended for people to have *fresh* water. I don't know much about the science of things, so I can't help but wonder what in the world did they do to the water that required it to sit for 3 whole weeks before consumption.
Yes!
May I ask where this was so I might avoid drinking the water should I ever go there?
Very true. I use their "ultimate" filters in our sink. As I also drink goodly amounts of ice water, I notice a distinct change in "lack of flavor" when the water is filtered. And I mean that in the "it tastes less like pipes" way.
Probably would make a very good iced white tea on a hot summer day.
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