Recreate famous water profiles using supermarket bottled water | Hacker News Reader

Recreate famous water profiles using supermarket bottled water

waterdictionary.net

133 pointssmugglerFlynn61 comments

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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?

Oh, dammit. Unbookmarks

It was a good concept. Somebody should make it.

What it's showing is the water profile historically associated with brewing Edinburgh and Scottish ales, rather than Edinburgh's current tap water profile. But yeah, it should be much more clear about this.

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.

> can never be better than your local aquifer

lol getting that fresh water

also bottles have the mineral composition labeled, varies for tap water

It does vary, but as long as the sources stay the same, the composition will also stay within certain limits. For instance, Munich publishes its water composition. The list combines items that you might find on a mineral water label, like calcium and magnesium, with items that you usually won't find there, like lead (don't worry, it's below 0.001 mg/l): https://www.swm.de/dam/doc/wasser/trinkwasser-analysewerte.p...

And bottled water likely varies by at least a similar amount - they're not testing and re-printing every bottle after all.

Yeah... especially since the source isn't really cheap either. Also, I have never understood how it can possibly make sense to ship water from Fiji to the US, or even from France or Italy to Germany. Local mineral waters may not have as much prestige, but they taste just as good. Actually, that would be a better project: compare the mineral composition of mineral waters to check which local mineral water best matches the taste of an imported brand.

It's because restaurants make the most money on drinks, so selling you overpriced water with artificial branding becomes an excuse to charge the same money for water as one would for sodas.

And some cannot be convinced that tap water could be safe to drink. I know a few people who exclusively drink glass-bottled water, because they fear microplastics on top of that.

The latter is yet another reason to ask for tap water in restaurants. It's probably fine but besides the uncertainty of what the plastics and additives do to a person, might as well not have more plastic bottles be produced, leech into the far-transported water, and then have to be disposed of responsibly. I usually explicitly request they write it up as a normal water price and just bring me a glass of tap

Restaurants charge for tap water where you are?

Yes, in Europe it's standard to charge for tap water. I don't think I ever got water in restaurant for free in Europe (I'm European).

> And some cannot be convinced that tap water could be safe to drink.

It's a cultural thing, mostly. Not everyone has the luxury of, like me, growing up in a place like Munich where the water source is clean and pristine needing very little treatment. In many places water has to be chlorinated or, in the worst cases, is contaminated with gases from fracking to the tune you can set it ablaze [1]. Or it's contaminated with lead [2], PFAS [3] and pharmaceuticals [4]. And that's just "rich world problems" - people who grew up in developing countries or even in extremely rural areas of Western countries who grew up with water unsafe to drink before boiling it off will be even more skeptical.

The value proposition of many a "branded bottle water" is that the water sources they use are so old and deep that no human activity can have contaminated them.

P.S.: And that's before thinking about if the hot water supply in your home has its tank flushed and cleaned and the anodes serviced regularly... neglect your hot water installation and you'll get disgusting shit like [5].

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/scientific-study-links-fl...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24685...

[3] https://environment.ec.europa.eu/news/new-eu-rules-limit-pfa...

[4] https://www.usgs.gov/water-science-school/science/pharmaceut...

[5] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ppNPRbNysg4

> people who grew up in developing countries or even in extremely rural areas of Western countries who grew up with water unsafe to drink before boiling it off will be even more skeptical.

I'm Brazilian. We learn early in school that water must always be boiled or filtered before drinking. I'd feel very uncomfortable drinking water directly from plumbing, no matter how much some people say it's safe.

Every place here (and I don't say that lightly, I don't think I've ever seen an exception) has either a water filter connected to the plumbing (for unlimited on-demand filtered water), or at least a separate standalone filter, or sometimes a drinking fountain which gets its water from large mineral water containers (and it's normally real mineral water bottled from real mineral springs, not that nonsense that is adding minerals to tap water and saying it's mineral water).

Edit: and IIRC, there's a law that bars and restaurants must provide filtered tap water to their clients without extra cost when requested. Even the law requires filtering.

Keep in mind that the filters most people use in Brazil mostly only handles dirt that accumulates on the water tank and keeps the water in a nice temperature. If the tap water had any contamination, those filters would change nothing.

It's still good to get rid of that dirt. If you live near a main street or some other polluted place, it can become harmful. But it's not that much of a change.

> P.S.: And that's before thinking about if the hot water supply in your home has its tank flushed and cleaned and the anodes serviced regularly... neglect your hot water installation and you'll get disgusting shit like

I guess it’s time to post this PSA again.

Never ever drink from the hot tap, always turn on the cold faucet only or turn the handle all the way to cold. Even if you’re filling a pot or kettle with water to boil.

The inside of a water heater is frightening.

"A little osmosis machine"... Where do I find these? Would it fit in my appartement? Can I install it without plumbing if I am only a renter? How often do I need to clean it? How often do I need to change the filter? How many kW and how many liters of wasted water do I need to spend to get half a liter of osmosed water?

Your recommendation may be valid for large volumes long term (like the aquarium or brewing at craft beer scale), but for all the other uses not.

You can get no install ones that go on your counter or light install ones you connect under your sink (no more difficult than installing a bidet in your apartment). Cost wise they are cheap enough they pay for themselves (including filters) vs even cheap bottled water over the course of a year (well, if you only drink 1 bottle per week or something the economics will be different - 2 bottles per day should ~break even). ~3 filters per year, depends on the model and usage.

Bottled water is usually just a convenience factor of "I can take x bottles from this pack wherever at once on demand, or even grab them full of water I like while not at home".

Its a reverse osmosis machine. You can get them for as low as $100 on amazon or anywhere. I have one at the house attached to my sink that makes about 20 gallons a day on demand and a small commercial one at work that cost 220 and makes 500 gallons a day (its about 2sqft in size) filling a large tank. Neither are large nor high in electric usage, the home one has no power, the small commercial has a small booster pump. Its the water usage that is high, to get a gallon of pure ro water is about 1.5 to 2.5 gallons of "waste". You can use that waste for watering the lawn or rinsing things but its extremely mineral heavy. You dont clean them just replace the filters every so often (not nearly needed as often as recommended)

Is the waste higher in the unpowered machine than the powered machine? Because saving electricity at the cost of water isn't necessarily a good thing .

The inherent issue with reverse osmosis is that you build up a "brine" on the input side. And the higher the gradient of these ions, the harder it is to do to the reverse move. The normal osmotic action is to pull pure water back through to dilute the brine.

I've heard of systems that attempt to just let the brine diffuse back through the source water system rather than dumping it. But, I think this is against code in any modern, thoughtful regulatory environment. You normally want explicit back-flow prevention to reduce the chance of contamination of the water system by end users.

You can also get gadgets called “permeate pumps” that consume no electricity and help a bit.

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.

I think you're right. Relevant here is the This American Life segment "Call in Colonel Mustard For Questioning" about how Vienna Beef in Chicago had a difficult time determining what minor uncontrolled variable was making hot dogs taste different after they moved production locations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3140528

This is a great episode.

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.

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?

Are you complaining it looks AI?

It might be, but it's also a sentence I might have read on any "choosing water for coffee" article of the last twenty years.

I was complaining about stilted prose, and indeed a few years back I would just have let it slide. But now it grates more I guess.

Which is deeply ironic since a few years ago stilted prose would be unavoidable, whereas now it’s more often a result of the choice to not use an LLM to clean up your text.

to not use an LLM?

Precisely! There are orders of magnitude more people who are poor English writers (by virtue of being ESL or merely not having the gift) than those gifted at English prose.

What we are seeing is not a decrease of quality writing but a compression of the large span of poor writing into a much more narrow mediocre range.

I disagree. To really produce maximally stilted prose, on has to have had exposure to much constrained and convoluted ramblings. Nothing says "nouns slogging native" like pomp.

English with a foreigner's mistakes is nicer!

Entire project is vibe coded nonsense.

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!

For anyone that decides to vibe-code these kind of tools, have a generated content vs. manual labour split.

This isn't bound to AI-use, even if you scrape factual content, a million and one things can go wrong, so having some kind of checkbox that says "Yes, I have reviewed and verified it is one hundred and fifty percent certainly confidently true, a fact even" forces you to verify what you're publishing is true.

A POC is only 10% of the way.

"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.

That will drive off the other dissolved gasses, and at least according to some, will make the water taste stale.

Coffee heads have told me to use freshly heated and not reboiled water for that reason.

I always thought this was baloney but James Hoffman’s recent video where he steamed water with the steam wand instead of boiling it normally for an americano changed my mind. I tried it and it was a genuinely different tasting drink. Not sure what causes it but different dissolved gases seems plausible.

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...

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.

There's a process some brewers use to treat water, to make it similar to a well in England, called burtonisation, using various salts

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.

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

Care to share some ratios? Where you get the minerals from? Electrolite mix? Won't it explode everywhere if you shake after carbonation?

I buy raw food grade minerals - calcium carbonate, magnesium carbonate, plus salt, lite salt, epsom salt, baking soda.

I make about a 40x concentrate (500ml makes 20 liters), I put about 15-20ml in an ~800ml bottle. Make sure you shake it vigorously immediately before use, like literally shake right until you pop the cap off and pour it, or you'll get weak water early and strong water later (it won't dissolve)

Recipe is something in this ballpark, no need to be especially precious about it, you won't taste minor variation:

    35g CaCO3
    15g MgCO3
    15g NaHCO3
    2g Epsom Salt (MgSO4+7H2O)
    1g Salt (NaCl)
    1g Lite Salt (NaCl + KCl)

You have to carbonate it very hard using something like a soda stream or a CO2 regulator, need it to go well beyond drinkably fizzy to dissolve the minerals (mostly calcium carbonate)

It's better to use as cold water as you can get, carbonates are inversely soluble in water based on temperature, so just above freezing (~2C or ~35F), and it'll hold more carbonation.

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

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.

I’m calling BS on this. Biggish claims that are so vague as to be borderline unverifiable, no scientific basis laid out.

The whole thing is slop.

Why x Matters: is absolutely a tell

https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Mineral-Water

It's a thing, just a very niche thing. There are fancy walter filtration systems that put minerals back so it's more controlled. I suppose this is useful when you're living in America, where everything is chlorined to death.

https://xkcd.com/2982/

You clearly haven't tasted coffee or tea brewed with hard water. And I don't see why yeast or fish wouldn't be more comfortable in some range of mineral composition than another.

Water for pizza crust would also be a good category.

I drink DI RO water <1 ppm TDS.

> 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...

oblig ProZD https://youtu.be/4ZK8Z8hulFg

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