Field notes
A growing archive of books, articles, videos, and interviews that have shaped how I think about what's in the bottle.
Yes, I'm a quest to taste every sparkling water in the world, but I realize that I would probably need to live to be 500 to actaully achieve that. Alas, it is a worthwhile question...so wny not make it even more impossib…
Yesterday, I had the honor of hosting my first sparkling water tasting event for a group of 40 university students. I must have spent a dozen hours researching and considering which waters to choose. At the end of the da…
I’m fascinated by magnesium. I started taking different magnesium supplements before bed several years ago and the impact on the depth and quality of my sleep was quick and lasting. Simply keeping a sleep log, I’ve also…
This question pops up online quite a bit, so I decided to work through it one step at a time. What is in a soda versus what is in a sparkling water? Soda tends to be a lot of sugar, thirty, forty, fifty grams, plus artif…
I went down a rabbit hole today on sparkling water containers...glass versus plastic versus aluminum cans. I hoped to conclude with a little clarity, but I didn't. Most of the research I found was written by someone with…
Water does not have a flavor of its own. Flavor comes from three main sources, but especially the first: minerals (which come from the rock through which the water flows underground), dissolved organic matter (pine-fores…
What is terroir? It is a French word, originally used to describe wine, that points to how the specific place where something comes from leaves a mark on it, shaping how it feels and tastes. This can be rocks and soil, c…
Is there such a thing as "natural" sparkling water? Absolutely! In fact, the manufactured sparkling water that we find in most sparkling waters today was discovered by Joseph Priestley in 1767, and part of why it was suc…
Why am I so intrigued by sparkling water? I've asked myself the same thing, and I think that I figured out the answer. There was an education philosopher and theorist at Simon Fraser University named Kieran Egan who was…
This book is about more than sparkling water but it gives a rigorous way to taste it without guesswork. It emphasizes controlled conditions so factors like temperature, glassware, and order do not skew perception. The ta…
Gleick evaluates bottled water by stepping back and asking why it exists at all in a country with widely available municipal water. He starts with perception, how marketers reframe ordinary water as safer or purer, then…
Royte looks at water by pulling apart the story behind it rather than the taste. She starts with source claims and checks whether they hold up, often finding ordinary municipal water disguised as something else. From the…
Michael Mascha is a modern legend in the world of fine water. In this book he evaluates water using a framework similar to wine tasting. He emphasizes origin and geology, noting that the type of source and surrounding ro…
This book is about more than sparkling water, but it explains where its features (or character) actually comes from. Like his other book, Chapelle traces how water moves through rock over time, dissolving minerals that l…
This book is outdated in some ways, but in other ways it still functions like a foundational field notebook for tasting bottled waters, including sparkling ones. The classifications and brand landscape reflect an earlier…
This book is about more than sparkling water, but it gives the geological “prequel” to what you taste in a glass or bottle. Chapelle focuses on how spring waters are formed, moving through specific rock layers over long…
I love this book. It is the perfect introduction to the modern world of sparkling water. Joseph treats seltzer less like a product and more like a cultural artifact (which sparks the ethnographic researcher in me) that k…