Question:

My company has moved from the yummy spring water bottles to a "reverse osmosis" filtered cooler thingy. It tastes like liquid tinfoil, and gives that slick, metallic "right before you upchuck" taste in your mouth. In short, it's disgusting.

Well, I'm stuck with it, apparently, but it seems as if our Office Manager has totally fallen for the sales propaganda - it has no artificially-added minerals so it's "water at its purest form". Etc. etc.

So, does anyone know about this system, and whether it's true that this vile water is more "pure" and hence "better" than other waters?

Answer:

Reverse osmosis filters are generally pretty good at removing lots of stuff from water. You can look up a recent Consumer Reports review and see just what the one your boss installed removes. They are generally better than other filters are removing the sorts of other things one generally would like removed, unlike a Brita(TM) filter. Brita(TM)s remove some stuff, but they aren't good to rely on if you have an actual water-quality problem (instead of just a taste problem.)

NB for readers with bad water: find out exactly what is making your water bad before buying a filter. Filters that remove ghiarrdia are not necessarily the same filters that remove chromium.

That being said, water in its purest form doesn't taste like much. Try an experiment: get a bottle of spring water (whatever kind) and a bottle of distilled water. Do a taste test. The distilled water, which is about as pure as you can get, will taste flat and strange. The spring water should taste like, well, spring water.

The metallic taste may be coming from the pipes in the water cooler, not the filtering process.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any way to get the minerals back *into* water that has been purified. A Brita(TM) won't do you any good here unless you can get to the water before the reverse osmosis filter (and since most reverse osmosis filters are hooked up at a point before the water comes out of the tap, you may be S.O.L.)

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