Bottled Water?

There is a brand called Willow, and it's not easy to find, it shows up in odd places here and there (at least in Ireland), but it is THE best tasting water I have ever drank, ever. I wouldn't be a water snob or notice much difference but that one knocked my socks off.

Link to their website

Tap water straight out of the tap is yuk, but I fill up a bottle and put it in the fridge and it makes such a difference.

That's what I do. I always have a couple of big bottles of tap water in the fridge.

As for bottled, I wish I could say I've tasted a difference among the different brands, but I haven't. Neither here nor in the US. 

My only advice would be to keep trying different kinds until you hit on one you like.

I usually just drink tap water.  I, too, like it really cold, but we have good tasting water up here.  I drink a lot of sparkling water.  I use it as a replacement for diet coke, and for that I use either Highland Spring or the Tesco version of the same.

Selling bottled water is as much a triumph of marketing as sitting on thousands of gallons of kersoene and fyling at 30000ft.

 

(and I grew up with well water, so I'm pretty good at noticing when something tastes "off").

Well water is always such a shock when I go home. 

Well water is always such a shock when I go home. 

As a child, it was always a shock when I went swimming in well water...

I usually just drink tap water.  I, too, like it really cold, but we have good tasting water up here.  I drink a lot of sparkling water.  I use it as a replacement for diet coke, and for that I use either Highland Spring or the Tesco version of the same.

I like the tap water here.

But I hate plain carbonated water on its own. Bleech! But I really like it with squash, makes me feel like I'm drinking a fruit soda. 

Well water is always such a shock when I go home. 

To make matters even more complicated, our house dates from the 1840s and the kitchen pipes are original to the house (not sure when the house was first plumbed but it's been many decades).  The bathroom was added in 1976 and even though those pipes are over thirty years old these days, there's still a vast difference in the taste of the water in the bathroom vs that in the kitchen - so much so that I grew up carrying water from the bathroom to the kitchen (pots of water for boiling veg, jugs of water to put through the filtered pitcher for iced tea and for drinking, and full ice-trays).  Always fun trying to explain to friends that no, just getting a glass of water from the kitchen tap really WASN'T something they wanted to do.

Meg, are you saying your well water had a bad taste?  Our house wasn't connected up to well water, but on the town water mains instead.  However, we did have an outdoor, electrically operated well - and that water was better by far than the town water - very clear, very cold, and great tasting - right out of the garden hose!  We only used it for any kind of outdoor water use (gardening, water for pets/stock, etc) and for filling our 'swimming pool' (big circular aluminum horse tank).

To make matters even more complicated, our house dates from the 1840s and the kitchen pipes are original to the house (not sure when the house was first plumbed but it's been many decades).  The bathroom was added in 1976 and even though those pipes are over thirty years old these days, there's still a vast difference in the taste of the water in the bathroom vs that in the kitchen - so much so that I grew up carrying water from the bathroom to the kitchen (pots of water for boiling veg, jugs of water to put through the filtered pitcher for iced tea and for drinking, and full ice-trays).  Always fun trying to explain to friends that no, just getting a glass of water from the kitchen tap really WASN'T something they wanted to do.

Meg, that's funny, my sisters and I growing up always preferred bathroom water to kitchen water! Though, unlike you, I don't know why ours tasted better from the bathroom tap.

Our water at work is undrinkable (comes out a nasty brownish orange color most of the time...sometimes with odors...sometimes without) so we have to bring bottled water if we want to drink throughout the day. I definitely have preferences for certain brands. I find the Nestle brand water disgusting. Dasani isn't much better. Ozarka is my preferred brand but usually costs a bit more than the others.

I find the Nestle brand water disgusting. Dasani isn't much better. Ozarka is my preferred brand but usually costs a bit more than the others.

I found an article online the other day whereby Coca Cola admitted that what they were marketing in the UK as Dasani, was in fact nothing more than tap water, rather than spring/glacier water (in fact, looking it up, it is also just treated tap water in the US as well). The UK authorities then found that Dasani water had levels of bromate in it that were too high - the brand was withdrawn from the UK market (http://www.foodqualitynews.com/news/ng.asp?id=50786-coke-withdraws-dasani) and plans to launch it in continental Europe were cancelled!

Meg, are you saying your well water had a bad taste? 

Quite the opposite, actually - I vastly prefer the water at home to the fluoridated city water that I encountered when I went off to uni!  It's the pipes that make the water in the kitchen taste horrible - god knows what state they're in, but the water is awful.   Our well water is incredibly hard, though - we've got old porcelain sinks and bath and there are blue and brown stains in both from years and years of mineral deposits.  And there's a problem with the well these days, too - when it rains heavily, the water turns a bit brown (good old Georgia red clay!), which is fine for showers but is a pain when it comes to cooking, drinking and washing clothes - hence the plastic jugs.  The perils of living in an old house, I guess!  Luckily () it doesn't rain too often in Georgia these days.

Yes, to my knowledge, Dasani has never been spring water - just, basically, filtered tap water - which you can do yourself with something like a Brita pitcher.  But I think Coca Cola has probably made millions on it.

Meg, yes, where I grew up, we had old pipes with all those mineral deposits - yuck!  You couldn't draw a glass of water from the tap without seeing the minerals floating in it & the water was terribly hard.  The town next to ours has a big salt mine - so I think there's a lot of sodium in the water table around there.

I feel so fortunate in that Leeds has the most marvelously soft water - naturally!

I found an article online the other day whereby Coca Cola admitted that what they were marketing in the UK as Dasani, was in fact nothing more than tap water, rather than spring/glacier water (in fact, looking it up, it is also just treated tap water in the US as well). The UK authorities then found that Dasani water had levels of bromate in it that were too high - the brand was withdrawn from the UK market (http://www.foodqualitynews.com/news/ng.asp?id=50786-coke-withdraws-dasani) and plans to launch it in continental Europe were cancelled!

I always buy bottled water at the airport so I have plenty water for the flight....flying from the UK I can get Buxton, but I resent having to pay for Dasani when I'm coming back from the US for that very reason. There's a few others in the US that are the same, just look on the bottle and it says "purified water" with no mention of spring water....and yet people buy them to drink at home!