FAQ logic - Water

I agree; we recycle water.

Thanks for the reply :).

Oh, okay, you're already using the 3-stage filter.

Me, too!

Some general comments on all of this:

1) I seem to remember reading or hearing somewhere that distilled water is dangerous to drink all of the time, because it leaches minerals out of your body instead of replacing them. Someone correct me if I have it wrong please, :) (Of course, if you're not using it all the time I don't imagine that applies. It has always tasted flat to me though)

2) I was looking for a good bottled water myself since, while there isn't anything as wrong with our tap water as there is in, say, parts of New York (and I know people on here said it's good water there...I drank the water at C.W. Post University dorms one year in the late 80s, it was nasty. That may not even be in the city, I have no idea...) mine is still full of chlorine which by itself can disturb the purity of tea...anyway, I was reading Consumer Reports and they did some kind of taste test along with other qualities (don't remember it all right now, if someone wants I can look up the date and article title if you want to go find it) and they had some expensive water at the top but then second or third was Dannon water, which really surprised me. So if I get water it is that one (which does taste pretty good to me and which I get in the hard clear plastic instead of the soft plastic that can leave a taste) or I get Volvic if I'm feeling rich. Volvic tastes really good...really neutral that is...to me for tea. And you can get it for less expensive at Cost Plus near where I live.

3) And Bluesea: "I just checked and my bottles have a PKD date...which was two days *after* I bought them. The EXP date is the year after the PKD date."

You got water from the FUTURE? How cool is that??? :D

Melinda

The Consumer Reports article I read was from 2000. Here's the citation:

"It's Only Water, Right?" (bottled water buyer's guide), Consumer Reports, August 2000, v65 i8 p15(5)

The top three overall were Volvic, Dannon, and Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water, all in the PET or clear (hard...brittle) plastic bottles. Check out the article if you can, it has interesting info about tests they ran for chemicals leaching out of the softer plastic containers and into the water, also it rates a bunch of other waters and discusses minerals and various other stuff.

Melinda

Good info. Thanks for posting it.

That screams "pseudo-science" so loudly that i wonder if Dr. Balch has lost his license, or perhaps acquired his MD by mail, or in some banana republic.

For one, distilled water is hardly pure, as anyone in the electronic component manufacturing business can explain in detail. It's a lot /more/ pure, but the water they use to wash things like uncut wafers of chips has a few orders of magnitude fewer contaminants. Distilled water will leave behind little crystals of minerals on the substrate, the stuff they use leaves behind nothing.

"Flushes out toxins" is one of my favorite pseudo-scientific health terms. Like most good lies, it contains a grain of truth.

Since distilled water has more capacity as a solvent than tap water, mathematically speaking the portion of the water you consumed that was distilled carries more out with it as it passes through your kidneys than the portion of the water you consumed that wasn't.

But what really happens is, your kidneys can only flush what they've got on hand, and if you drink only distilled water, your urine won't have significantly more flushed out toxins in it than if you didn't.

If you really want to 'flush out toxins', have another cup of tea. The more you pee, the more you flush out. Until you've run out of things to flus out - you can gauge the effectiveness of this method using the informal 'color method'. No cheating with dyes or bleaches, please.

I see he also authored "The Super Anti-Oxidants" which proclaims loudly that he is either not much of a scientist or was asleep during that section of his medical training.

Here's how anti-oxidants work.

There are things in the environment - even pristine wilderness untouched by man - that are missing a few electrons. We call these 'free radicals'.

Putting it simply, they steal electrons from nearby molecules, causing their neighbor to need to grab an electron from some other bit, typically by grabbing an oxygen atom, or oxidizing. This sometimes causes minute chain reactions. It's not a good thing, but it's no tragedy.

An anti-oxidant is a molecule with a few extra atoms. If one happens to be in the neighborhood of a free radical, it can give up an electron or three without needing to replace them.

You don't need many anti-oxidants. You can probably use slightly more than the average person already has in their diet, but the truth is that the returns are rapidly diminished as you take in more and more. You quickly reach a point where all your free radicals are pretty much taken care of.

Consuming an excessive amount of an anti-oxidant is actually a lot worse than having too little in your diet. For example, enough vitamin C will give you flu-like symptoms, and do a really effective job of rapidly removing toxins from your body. My father swears by this cold remedy, fwiw.

I have another book to suggest.

08225577/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-4302147-3801553?v=glance&s=books&nP7846

Ah, but you see, you're railing against what I remembered (or disremembered as the case may be), not what the book actually says so, it may be my bad and not the doctor's or the nutritionalist. My point was that I could cite a source for distilled water and my friend couldn't cite a source against it. The issue wasn't resolved, just dropped for lack of additional material to go by.

Sorry that I don't have the book on hand to give an exact quote.

It's a moot argument. Once it osmotes through your intestines it's just water. We didn't invent reverse-osmosis purification, it happens all the time.

The salient point, for the group, is that "better" is a subjective term.

Whatever makes tea the way you like it is better. In my adverse conditions that's a three-stage PUR filter and extended refrigeration at about 34 degrees f. So far. I will probably tinker further.

Aside from being a better solvent, distilled water is going to have a different ph than your tap water.

Gasses in solution - especially carbon dioxide - are going to change that ph by as much as a whole point, or more. CO2 in solution with water is carbonic acid.

The ph difference is going to change what and how much is steeped from the leaves, and will affect chemical reactions in the tea as well.

'better' is between you and your tea. All i hoped to do was to offer people a larger set of tools for fine-tuning their steeping method. It's not that I'm an expert, i've just been collecting tools.

Now, it's time for me to flush my toxins with a good SFTGFOP Assam.

Heh. I'm sipping Guava Ginseng Green.

Yes, especially for tea, it's the taste that's important.

For citizens of the U.S.A. who might be wondering about their local water, the EPA has some water reports online at:

I was surprised to see that my area had a health violation of contaminating TTHM for 3 months last year :(. While I've been drinking bottled water and using it for tea, I'm glad that I now have a faucet filter for all my consumable water.

Have a good one :).

First point is a common but incorrect belief. Hydrolysis of aqueous CO2 to carbonate is not rapid unless catalyzed; some consider its rate in marine environments a key factor in determining the global atmospheric carbon balance. Also wondering what you mean in the last bit; I doubt that there's much chemistry going on in tea on the brewing timescale. (Reaction with residual "chlorine" is one likely exception.) The middle bit is certainly true, and minerals may have as strong an effect on extraction of critical taste components as pH itself - via salting-out, chelation and other mechanisms.

-DM

In Magna UT, the water is worse. I'm not kidding. One of my neighbors was in Desert Storm. Everyone in is unit got disintary from the water, exept him. We've got a couple of saying about the water in Magna: Miricles happen in Magna! People walk on water! and Magna water, water you can chew. I grew up on that stuff. I've never broken a bone, and I haven't had a cavity in 13 years. Marlene

I'm more than a little frightend. The Granger water district (alas, not good ole' magna, they've got a nearly spotless record), has nearly 50 reported violations. 1 major heath, and many many major reporting violatons. Eek! I'm getting a filter! Marlene

Eric & Derek (and anyone else) -

Have you tried the Pur 2-stage filter? How did it affect your tea compared to the 3-stage filter?

Truth is i can't get the 2-stage filter anymore. Every retailer i can find only sells the 3 stage now.

fwiw, the Britta pitcher filter, which appears for all the world to be a funny shaped container full of activated carbon and nothing else, fits just fine inside a Pur pitcher. I may try that option, since they're much cheaper.

I'm not really fiddling with my process at home very much. My bigger problem is figuring out what to do about the fact that when i steep the same leaves in the same method (same glassware, in fact), using the same electric kettle, when i make tea at work it's always astringent and bitter.

Got to be the water, which is delivered labeled "high mountain spring water," which could either be an honest description or just a brand name. The city water is legally potable but wholly unpalatable and I'm not interested in filtering at work.

I can't recall if I saw any at Wal-Mart when I bought my filter the other day. It could be on a phase-out schedule now that the 3-stage is out.

Good to know. Thanks.

Bummer. All things being equal, it must be the water, but what's in it that makes your tea so awful? Good luck!