Nutgraf

Everyone's a critic.

We arrived, we obsessed, we sampled and tasted and discussed and ate some of those lovely flat Spanish almonds from WholeFoods, and we scribbled furiously.

Our tasting crew included some of the sharpest critics I know. Hey – there’s nothing wrong with having high standards. But they took no prisoners as they sampled the goods. They made a couple of suggestions for improving the methodology, including a four-part fizziness metric (bubble size, quantity, longevity and relative sharp/softness). These will be taken under advisement for future regimens.

And then came the tabulation. Man, do I dread tabulation. And now the results are in:

Trader Joe’s Sparkling Mineral Water wins!

Comments from our illustrious panel for Trader Joe’s included:

• Nothing special.
• Refreshing, thirst-quenching.
• [this space intentionally left blank]
• Tiny happy bubbles.
• Lots of sting/fizz, not enough sparkle. Fuller taste than previous 2.

It might not sound like a strong showing, but we had some pretty polarized reactions to many of the others. Assorted comments include:

• Fizz all bite and no sparkle.
• Almost industrial.
• To be reevaluated.
• Carbonated salt water.
• Needed an almond to cleanse palate.
• Dirty, metallic.
• omg bad.

Well kids, that was fun.

One surprise was that Safeway brand Club Soda tied for 2nd place with San Pelligrino. Testers noted that it had a sweet overtone, without any real mineral flavor. Fine work, Safeway!

So here we are. With a winner in a batch of 10. But we didn’t get to test all of the varieties I wanted to. I really was looking forward to lightly obsessing over some of the restaurant staples: Voss, Saratoga… so we’re likely to do a round II.

Suggestions for how to improve the second round are welcome! As are additional brands to test.

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