Bottled Waters: Our Blind Taste Test

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In the course of fact-checking Anna Lenzer’s excellent piece on Fiji Water, and in writing my own sidebars to the piece, I drank a lot of water. And truthfully, I liked the taste of the stuff coming out my San Francisco tap better than the Dasani or Arrowhead I bought from the bodega. So I got to wondering: Can all these bottled waters on the shelf really taste that differently from one another? Are they better than tap? Could I even tell the difference between Volvic and Voss? To find out, I bought eight bottles of water at my local Whole Foods and had a blind taste test in the Mother Jones office with several editors, interns, fellows, and art staff. For a good measure, we also included filtered and unfiltered San Francisco tap in the test.

The results: Fiji Water, for all its claims of purity, tasted okay to our staff. One or two people out of about ten said it was their favorite. “I actually liked Fiji best,” said one staffer, who will remain anonymous.

The favorite waters, by a pretty good margin, were Volvic and Whole Foods’ 365 electrolyte-enhanced water. San Francisco tap (unfiltered) also did well, and Voss was lauded for being the most “neutral” water (it literally tasted like air). I had high hopes for Eternal water from New Zealand, which had the prettiest packaging, but our reviewers found it positively intolerable with comments like “gross,” “plastic flavor,” and “tasted like it sat out for a while.” Similarly, Balance water, which boasts Australian wildflower essences, was rated “not so great” and “diz-gusting.”

For whatever reason, reviewers liked the taste of San Francisco tap far better than filtered tap, saying the filtered tasted tinny and metallic while the unfiltered was cleaner and lighter, even “slightly fruity.” Maybe that’s because our staff is used to drinking unfiltered tap (Kleen Kanteens are legion in the MoJo HQ), or maybe it’s because San Francisco tap is purer than most bottled waters: It comes from the granite-lined Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park, 167 miles from San Francisco. It’s good quality water, so pure that the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is not even required to filter it because it already meets or exceeds all federal and state standards naturally.

Most bottled waters—whose sources could be municipal tap, aquifier, or spring waters—are  treated to a number of processes, such as being flashed with ultraviolet light to get rid of bacteria and other unwanted organisms. In fact, bottled water manufacturers often distill their water so heavily that they actually reintroduce minerals later for taste. Despite the often elaborate processes bottled water companies take to purify their water, a GAO report last month found that the FDA puts less stringent requirements on bottled water than the EPA does on tap water. Another tap water bonus: It costs only about $.003 per gallon (versus about $6 per gallon for bottled water), and has a low carbon footprint.

Below is the listing of the waters we tasted, in rough order of preference. What’s your favorite bottled water? Do you drink based on taste, or CO2 footprint? And can you taste the difference?
1. Volvic

2. Whole Foods 365 electrolyte-enhanced

3. San Francisco tap, unfiltered

4. Voss

5. Fiji

6. Evian

7. Dasani

8. San Francisco tap, filtered

9. Balance

10. Eternal

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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