Building Better Mineral Water: Deconstructing Mineral Waters
May 13, 2013
In the Water Project here on Alcademics, I'm looking at what is in commercial brands of sparkling mineral waters and reconstructing them.
To do so, first I looked at how to get all the dissolved solids out of tap water. Then I measured properties of commercial mineral waters - pH and dissolved solids- and compared them with publicly available information.
The next step was to examine what each mineral in mineral water tasted like on its own.
Again referring to the information on Khymos.org, I could see that the primary minerals in mineral water are Calcium, Sodium, Magnesium, and Potassium. The website also allows you to look at bicarbonate, sulfate, chloride, and nitrate.
To taste each of these minerals/salts on its own, I looked up the mineral water with the greatest concentration of a particular mineral, then added the ingredient in the proper amount to mineral-free water to give me that water's amount of it. In other words, if Apolinaris water had the most Magnesium (it did), then I started with water with no minerals in it and added the magnesium-containing ingredients in its recipe (epsom salts and magnesium carbonate) without worrying about the other minerals in the recipe.
I measured the pH and total dissolved solids (TDS) of the new mineral water before carbonation, and the pH again afterward. This was mostly to make sure I wasn't adding anything that would put the mineral water outside of a safe range of pH for drinking.
Single-Mineral Mineral Water Chart
| Mineral | Brand | Added | pH | TDS | pH after carbonation | Notes |
| Calcium | Contrex | Plaster of Paris | 9.9 | 244 | 4.8 | Cleared up after carbonation. Nice fizz. Taste: powdery/dry but not flavorful |
| Magnesium | Apolinaris | Epsom salts and Magnesium Carbonate | 10 | 132 | 5.1 | Cloudy until carbonate, creamy, mineraly, soft carbonation though |
| Sodium | Saint-Yorre | Baking soda and Table salt | 8.2 | 2170 | 5.9 | Clear before carbonation, great fizz, tastes very salty |
| Potassium | Saint-Yorre | Potassium Bicarbonate | 8.4 | 158 | 4.8 | Clear before carbonating, fizzes over with carbonation when charging, flavor is dryness; not much else |
| Sufate | Contrex | Epsom salt and Plaster of Paris | 7.4 | 459 | 5.1 | A little sweet. Really good carbonation. Nice texture. |
| Chloride | San Narciso | table salt | 6.9 | 876 | 6.9 | Good carbonation but just salty, blech |
It was interesting to see how these salts affected carbonation; not just flavor of the water.
The next step was to taste these one-mineral-rich waters with alcohol to see what happened. I thought they might bring out different aspects of flavor in booze and I was right.
I made an equal-parts Vodka Soda with each of the soda waters above. My tasting notes were:
| Mineral | Notes |
| Calcium | Bright and flavorful |
| Magnesium | Not a lot of character; a little salty |
| Sodium | Salty, way too salty |
| Potassium | Chalky but kinda good |
| Sulfate | Brighter and sweeter, but perhaps too much so |
| Chloride | Salty |
After this, I made a mineral blend of what I thought might work, using a combination of baking soda, epsom salt, and plaster of paris. This blend did make the flavor in vodka (and whisky) pop, but was too salty tasting.
My next experiments will be to build other mineral blends to find one(s) that I like. There is much more work to be done!
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The Water Project on Alcademics is research into water in spirits and in cocktails, from the streams that feed distilleries to the soda water that dilutes your highball. For all posts in the project, visit the project index page.
Your experiments sound crazy!
Water is something I have never thought about too much. About the only time I ever really thought about it much was a while back when I cracked a bottle of Lagavullin while in Taipei and decided regular Taiwanese bottled water was just not going to cut it with such a fine whisky. So I picked up some Evian. The result? Kind of nasty, to my taste anyway. The whisky was nicer with a no-frills Taiwanese bottled water - presumably with a minimal minerals content (except maybe for some heavy metals!).
Posted by: Seamus | May 13, 2013 at 07:06 PM
Fix The Pumps has some very useful material on this subject.
Posted by: Andre Bland | May 13, 2013 at 11:00 PM