Recreate famous water profiles using supermarket bottled water

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.

"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.

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!

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.

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

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

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

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...