Does anyone do a water subscription?

I live in Midtown atlanta which is supposed to have good quality tap water but am considering doing a water delivery subscription through Costco.

They're offering a choice between Nestle Pure Life which has minerals added for taste or Deer Park natural spring water.

I can't find their water quality reports to be able to properly assess which is more espresso machine safe.

Which would you recommend?

RJB83 wrote:I can't find their water quality reports to be able to properly assess which is more espresso machine safe.

Both Deer Park and Pure Life are Blue Triton (formerly known as Nestlé Waters North America) brands and you can find detailed analyses here: https://bluetriton.com/water-quality-reports.

The Deer Park spring water may come from many different sources, and they don't provide analysis for each source. So you have quite a bit of variability. The TDS might be anything between 5 ppm and 85 ppm. I suppose you could get a clue by checking it with a TDS conductivity meter. At the high end, where a cheap TDS meter would read about 65 ppm, it might have a calcium hardness and an alkalinity of 50 ppm as CaCO3, and a chloride ion content of up to 17 ppm.

Pure Life, being purified water spiked with minerals is softer than most Deer Park waters, and much less variable, with alkalinity of 5-15 ppm as CaCO3 and calcium hardness of 10 - 25 ppm as CaCO3. The chloride ion is 6 - 16 ppm, which is what you expect if they are adding calcium chloride.

The chloride is not a good thing for espresso equipment, especially if your water has low alkalinity. If I were forced to choose between these two, I would use the Pure Life, but would spike it with bicarbonate to get the alkalinity up in the 45 -60 ppm neighborhood. That would require about 1.2 - 1.4 grams of sodium bicarb or potassium bicarb added to each 5 gallon container.


Note: These analysis reports show the calcium levels in ppm as ion, so you need to multiply that number by 2.5 to get calcium hardness ppm as CaCO3.

3rd party test shows Nestle Pure Life containing many more times microplastics than other bottled water. I tried it once but then read reports like this:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccar ... fographic/

Very helpful info but that puts me at a stalemate.


Thanks for the water reports.

Did a bit more Google searching and pretty much ruled out pure life

https://www.tastingtable.com/756881/pop ... t-to-best/