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Every February, little Berkeley Springs, West Virginia holds the International Water Tasting Competition. Water samples are submitted from all over the world to compete for the title of best tap water and recently, they added new categories to judge bottled water. We all know that the taste of water changes from city to city, therefore, it makes sense to have water tasters in much the same way you have wine tasters or coffee tasters.
Wine tasting festivals are common, scattered across multiple vineyards, encouraging people to get out of their wine-drinking rut. While Berkeley Springs holds the largest water tasting festival, it's not the only water tasting festival out there. Once I started Googling, I found that many local cities were judging the taste of tap water from different parts of the county. Schenectady County is waiting to hear the results from their taste-off last week. There was a National Taste-Off last month where Macon, GA was the clear winner.
And now, the American Water Works Association has come up with a list of guidelines for holding your own water taste-off. While I don't need to compete with Berkeley Springs, it would still be fun to hold our own taste-off in the kitchen, buying up some of the different smaller (read: more localized) bottled water brands on the market.
More interesting is an article I found written by a water judge for the Berkeley Springs competition, especially her discussion on bottled vs. tap water, its impact on the environment, and water's taste overall. If you think the decision between bottled and tap water is black and white, think again. There are so many things to consider when choosing which water to drink both in terms of what is best for the environment and best for the body.
She writes of judging a water's taste:
Von Wiesenberger quickly explains the factors that cause differences in the taste of water. Chlorination and other sanitation techniques, of course, influence the flavor of municipal waters, but municipal waters may also contain minerals that escape a city’s filtration process. The taste of bottled-at-the-source spring water also varies with mineral content and with the geologic layers through which the water flows. The most difficult flight of water to judge according to taste is the “purified” water – your Aquafinas – because the bottlers of those waters deliberately seek to remove all vestiges of flavor. These are truly the tasteless waters, but he assures us that if we attend closely we can find subtle differences.
I've had the water at Berkeley Springs and during one summer of graduate school, went there weekly to fill up some jugs to bring back home. Did it really taste appreciably different from the tap water at home, an hour or so away? Probably not, but it felt so cool to be able to say that I was drinking water from the city that held the yearly water tasting championship. And it has personality. Flavour. And that is the whole point of the water tasting festival.
If you're looking for a good roadtrip this winter, the 20th anniversary Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting is scheduled for Saturday, February 25-28, 2010.
Melissa is the author of the infertility and pregnancy loss blog, Stirrup Queens and Sperm Palace Jesters. She keeps a categorized blogroll of 1800 infertility blogs and writes the daily Lost and Found and Connections Abound, a news source for the infertility blogosphere. Her infertility book, Navigating the Land of If, is currently on bookshelves (May, 2009). She is the keeper of the IComLeavWe (International Comment Leaving Week) list which is currently open for July.
