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Comment by lsc | Hacker News Reader

I am pretty sure that you could tell the difference between a brand of water that is distilled + minerals added and a brand of water that was not distilled in a blind taste test, especially if you drink mostly water.

I think there are even pretty big differences, say, between the tap water in Santa Clara and the tap water in Milpitas, for example.

I mean, If your argument is that bottled water is wasteful, I'm not disagreeing, but I am saying that if you drink mostly water, even pretty small differences in the mineral content make detectible differences in taste.

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"if you drink mostly water, even pretty small differences in the mineral content make detectible differences in taste"

absolutely. in the european cities where i lived, you could sometimes tell to which aquifer a household is connected. Depending on the neighborhood some need to clean their bathroom appliances from chalk twice as often.

I recall doing a science project in middle school where I did double-blind taste tests of tap water with a half-dozen brands of bottled water (in a place with decent-tasting tap water, FWIW). IIRC, people showed no statistically significant preference for Evian or other fancy bottled water over the local tap water.

That isn't to say that there's no taste difference, but that preferring a specific brand of bottled water is likely to be much more about the subconscious effect of marketing than something a priori more enjoyable about the mineral content of a specific brand.

Exactly my point. There are differences in taste and you recognize the taste of apecific brand or specific tap once you learn it.

But tastes vary so much that you couldn't tell random tap from random bottled.

sure, but buying random bottled water is probably about as common as buying a random brand of cigarettes. People have preferences.

Santa Clara water is very hard, I definitely notice a day difference as well. I think Milpitas gets it's water from Hetch Hetchy which is apparently very high quality.

really? huh. I have a pretty strong preference for santa clara water, but that might be me confusing it with the Milpitas smell. I mean, there are a lot of good places to eat in Milpitas, but the Milpitas smell just really puts me off.

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