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Quick post about water, sparkling water to be exact.

A few weeks ago as a shop we tested a group of six different sparkling waters.  We did this to test the value of each water in reference to preference and cleansing the palate.  (sorry about the rhyme) Anyway, Miro and I went to the store and bought a bunch of sparkling waters, cheap to expensive, from nearly no mineral content to super high mineral content.  We were testing for how it felt in our mouths as just a water, how well it cleansed out palate, how well it tasted with the coffee, and how well it worked with other brewing methods.  We first brewed a french press, then a chemex, then we pulled shots of espresso.  Long story short, San Pelligrino was by far the best sparkling water.  It had the smallest, and smoothest bubbles/mouth feel and overall worked the best with all the brewing methods throughout our experiment.  As a note though it also had the middle ground of mineral content out of all the water with around 930ppm.  Not sure if that had anything to do with it but it was funny to see the middle ground prevail.

Its strange looking at if for a few reasons, one is carbonation and its effects/ what is really going on with your palate in reference to carbonation.  Straight from the wikipedia page about carbonation "The fizzy taste can be caused by dilute carbonic acid inducing a slight burning sensation, but is never caused by the presence of bubbles."  So when everyone in the lab was saying "the bubbles in this one are out of control!" They were really saying that they were experiencing intense chemical reactions!!!!  

The second is finding some other people testing the same thing on different blogs (from 2 years ago it looks like) and their results@  cleanhotdry blog  It seems like they found nearly the same results as we did.

All in all, it was super fun, and I would recommended that anyone and everyone try out testing and challenging their palates.