What is the absolute best water to use for tea?

[wyardley]

anyone use maifan stones ? Any good source for them - for use in drinking/tea water ?

Only sources I know of are mentioned in:
http://www.teachat.com/viewtopic.php?p=62702

If I had known you wanted some, I would have sent some along with your kettle. If your water already has enough minerals, I think they actually add too much.

[Intuit]

Interesting product: maifan/activated carbon and ceramic in-line water filters.

http://www.root-cn.com/Cartridge-Kettle.htm

Edit: I had the fortune over most of the last decade to be supplied with rather high quality drinking water, soft (touch of natural organic acids, low in dissolved minerals without need for chlorination).

I now live in an area that has heavily chlorinated public water supply. Absolutely rotten quality. In-line filtration (Pur) for my tea and drinking/cooking water. Thinking about a shower-head filter as well. Nothing like taking a shower in swimming pool water, yum!

[emeraldrobot]

I typically use tap water gone through the brita filter and it tends to get all the bad taste out of the tap water here. Once I did buy a bunch of Arrowhead water, and then would soak some bamboo charcoal in the water (that I bought from a tea shop) for about an hour or so to see if there was much difference. I think that there was a little difference, the water tasted a little sweeter.

I'm not sure if its worth it all of the time, but there is a different so I'll probably use bamboo charcoal in spring water when it comes to the higher quality teas.

[teaisme]

[quote="fmoreira272"][quote="DJ3riple"]

I have a PUR filter as well that i use for cooking and strong flavored teas. But any other tea, specially shincha my choice is Poland Spring that i use for drinking water. I bought few spring water bottles(Fuji, Whole foods, Evian, glacian, etc) to compare. they turned out well but i dont know what they have in Maine that make their water just better.


Poland Spring water is indeed good for tea I second that.
Compared with Nestle's other brands of water (8 in the US) such as Deer Park, it seems to be of a higher quality. The range of Total Dissolved Solids found is much lower then the other brands. Water hardness range is also much lower. I believe these factors contribute to better tasting tea. You can get into more detail by going on their site and looking at the individual water quality reports. Kinda boring though.

I have heard good things about bamboo charcoal/carbon . Anyone know a site where I can buy some pieces.

[Intuit]

See last section:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland_Springs

"In June 2003, Poland Spring was sued for false advertising in a class action lawsuit charging that their water that supposedly comes from springs, is in fact heavily treated common ground water. The suit also states, hydro-geologists hired by Nestle found that another current source for Poland Spring water near the original site stands over a former trash and refuse dump, and below an illegal disposal site where human sewage was sprayed as fertilizer for many years"

http://www.wwdmag.com/Nestle-Sued-for-F ... sPiece5167

*squint* Heavily treated GW, Nectar of the Gods!

(In actuality, probably not much different in quality than GW in the Dallas-Fort Worth area).

[sriracha]

I got to try brewing tea with iron-rich water yesterday-sadly enough it was just stale Twinings' Russian Earl Grey so I'm not sure how much that had to do with the taste of the tea but in a pinch I would say that the water sort of dampened the overall intensity of the tea...more experimenting is of course needed.

Here at home I have two bottles of water I've collected from a spring some 30 km from here as I was curious to try it to see if it would make a difference to the taste...haven't actually got around to brewing any tea with it yet, though.

As I was scooping up the water from the dark spring Dad says "you know, this water is sorta rich in calcium..."

Now you're telling me..?:evil:

Still, I'll try making tea from that water as it's free from chlorine and whatnot.

[teaisme]

See last section:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland_Springs



(In actuality, probably not much different in quality than GW in the Dallas-Fort Worth area).

Yes we all know bottled water is a scam that is old news. The sources have always been sketchy. That does not mean all bottled water is the same though. In general common sense would tell you that there are less potential pollutants in GW from maine vs GW from NC or TX(b/c of states predominate industries)....I think that is just obvious. The upper northeast is know for its good water sources.
If it was all the 'same' there would not be such a difference in test report ranges between different brands/companies... and more people in NC would be drinking tap water straight like a lot of people from NY do. But the informed people don't because they know about the byproducts of hog production.

[Artemis]

I get those massive jugs of water from Whole Foods. It's pretty cheap, too, once you buy the actual plastic container.

[DJ3riple]

so far compared to the bottled waters I've tried, my filtered tap water seems superior in taste. Guess I'll be doing this until I can find maybe a better filter system.



also, Intuit, do you live in DFW or were you just making light of it because that's where I live?