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Oh great. After never fully grasping tasting notes of food, coffee, wines … now water.

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

Ok, so:

"""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?

Interesting! Given the obvious AI-written nature of this, I'd probably want to double-check the math, but it's a neat concept.

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!

I’m calling BS on this. Biggish claims that are so vague as to be borderline unverifiable, no scientific basis laid out.
I grew up in the Sierras. We got our water from Marlette Lake. It tasted "correct," like that's how water is supposed to taste, and water from anywhere else tasted wrong/gross.

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.

I make my own mineral water - it's surprisingly straightforward. Make a concentrate of whatever you like, add a bit of it into a carbonation bottle, carbonate it, shake, refrigerate, and either consume sparkling or let it offgas.

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

A very strange project. I can see the reasoning to get something familiarly premium from a cheap source, but surely in any developed country your only ever starting point should be tap water. Water that has been bottled months ago and been in (usually plastic) bottles for months can never be better than your local aquifer even if the source is harder. Gets more difficult of course if you are in a big city and your main source is recycled water from the local facility, but even then a little osmosis machine or simple filter will give you a better water than any Don Perrignon or Evian.
In Barcelona, I just use bottled water. The tap water is disgusting due to both the extremely high mineral content, recycled water and the poor quality of the pipes.

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.

My take is that it’s about better replicating products that use water. San Francisco bread for instance. So it’s not about the best water to drink.
It really depends an what you're doing. If you have a small aquarium, (5 or under gallons,) buying water instead of treating it yourself may be easier, and cheaper. (Aquarium chemicals aren't cheap.)

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.

Ehh, I guess the point is to get a "reference taste".

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.

The (old) foodblog Khymos has an excel sheet to calculate what salts to add to get different mineral waters starting from the known composition of your own tap water: https://khymos.org/2012/01/04/mineral-waters-a-la-carte/

Trying it out is still on my list; it's not easy to get food-grade necessary salts...

Water for pizza crust would also be a good category.

I drink DI RO water <1 ppm TDS.

I thought this was going to be how to recreate the taste of certain brands of bottled water, and I'm sad that it's not.

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.

"Let sparkling water stand uncapped overnight to degas before mixing."

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.

Should work to boil it to drive out the carbonic acid as CO2.
> Munich water is moderately hard, with relatively high bicarbonate.

Uh... moderately? Lol I'd disagree here. Anything touched by Munich tap water will have issues with limescale residue...

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There's a process some brewers use to treat water, to make it similar to a well in England, called burtonisation, using various salts
https://www.waterdictionary.net/water/edinburgh

> 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
They're wrong by a factor of 10 to 20.

How can I trust any other page on the site, if I check one and it's completely wrong?

Where is the southern california water profile? Take water from your sink and vigorously mix in 1 box of sidewalk chalk.
My Thermador has international brew selection thru Home Connect but I've never actually connected it to WiFI.