Taste Testing 14 Different Water Brands
Taste test, value for money and nice graphs
Okay, lockdown takes its toll on all of us, but instead of baking banana bread — mainly because we don’t have an oven — me and my sister decided to taste test different brands of water.
We live in Austria in an apartment in Vienna and here we get our tap water supplied by a pipeline directly from the Alps with long term quality studies and a very scientific table on the components of our drinking water. Since we have such high quality tap water — and this is included in the rent — we usually do not buy bottled water. As a person who has lived in Spain, the UK and Ireland, I can confirm that not all tap water tastes the same or even good. In South America I often purified my water with chlorine tablets to reduce the amount of bottled water which I would otherwise have to buy.
Preparation and methods — trying to be scientific about this
Apparently not every supermarket chain has the same selection of bottled water, so it took several trips to different stores to accumulate our lovely selection of 13 different water brands. The plan was to do a ‘blind’ test to see if we could recognize the brand after tasting it. My sister — who oddly has done this before — became “coordinator of the water taste test” and gave me and a friend — ‘the tasters’— different shot glasses of water. We would then describe the taste of the water according to personal taste.
Taste test
So here are the waters we have tried and how we rated them to our personal taste, we used a 1–10 star rating with 10 as the highest score.
- Wildalp
- Share
- Evian — spelled it backwards and you would actually get ‘naive’ — we really liked the esthetics of the glass water bottle
- SmartWater
- Astoria S. Budget
- Vöslauer
- Tap Water
- Fiji
- Waldquelle
- Laurentana
- Vittel Sport — this brand is owned by Nestlé
- Spar Lebensquelle
- Voss
- Silberquelle
Oddly enough they all tasted very differently and you can detect the slight change in mineral compositions and levels of calcium even as an amateur. However, we did an exceptionally bad job at trying to guess which water belonged to which brand. We could match zero brands to their waters just from their taste.
Good value for your money?
All those bottles of water cost us less than 20€, but we only bought small bottle sizes (375–750ml). We then calculated the price per liter from the Austrian retail price, but we did not correct for price reductions sold in bigger bottles.
Conclusion
Personal tastes differ greatly and we were shocked that we equally disliked the taste of the most expensive water (Voss) and the cheapest store bought water (Astoria). The best ranking waters to our taste are the most abundantly sold in Austria, which is probably why we liked them — we might have subconsciously recognized the taste. We also did not recognize the taste of our own tap water — another shocker — and in the blind tasting we also did not seem to like it.
But will I stop drinking tap water now and only buy the water I ‘objectively’ like? Definitely not, buying water is not only a huge extra expense, but also creates a lot of unnecessary plastic waste — especially if you get perfectly good tap water quality like we do here in Vienna.
This was a fun friday night activity and maybe you are a better ‘water sommelier’ than we are — but just try and see if you would recognize your own tap water in a ‘blind’ test. I dare you.
