i reckon you can only taste what's added to water, or smell what's surrounding it with drinking water, even if it's pure, i think it's not the water you're tasting but (sounds weird) your mouth. and smelling it...like when it rains, i think the water is just making the smells of the environment stronger, and that's what you're smelling. food is smellier when it's wet than when it's dry, and i think it's the same principle. i could be totally wrong, but i'm just saying what i've always kinda thought. and if water is really just H20... 2 hydrogen and 1 oxygen, i'm sure neither of those elements have a smell.
But impurity doesn't necisarrily mean bad. At least, not in my water. We have a well on our farm... the only thing added to it is maybe some calcium and a tiny bit of iron as it filters through the rocks underground. So, good impurities vs bad impurities.
What you are smelling is other components within the water or like in summer when rain hits a pavement you are smelling chemicals on the concrete. Pure water is completely neutral to taste and therefore smell
Kinda... but mostly you can taste things in the water, like minerals or, in most tap water, chlorine. Ewww!
I reckon we can taste n smell it , just we'd smell it n taste it alot more if it werent such a big part of our biological structure and didnt play such a big role in our evolution! know what i mean?
Ok. To sum things up here. Odorless and tasteless by average human standards, not the complete absence of odor and taste. Some people can hear at slightly higher frequencies. Some people can see slightly farther down the road. Some people can taste things a bit more. I believe that water has a taste and odor. Just as nearly every element, and every compound have some taste or odor, even if not detectable by humans. On the note that the smell and taste are impurities. No where in the world is there water that occurs naturally as H20, with no natural additives or 'impurities'. So, the 'pure' water, is actually a creation of technology. NATURAL water has a taste, and odor. Very much so. Something just to think about
You can taste and smell tap water, thats the stuff they add to it. But if you filter water so it's just H2O, then it's completly tasteless.
I know I can because all I drink is water and I can taste and smell it, I drink tap, but I also drink purified, from different companies, and sometimes I purify it myself and sometimes I spend alot of time purifying one cup of water, so I know I can taste it
Truly pure water has no taste nor smell, however, creating truly pure water is a practical impossibility. One can get fairly close and create fairly pure water, but truly pure water (literally nothing dissolved in it) is wholly impractical. Even using the best purification technologies available, we still have on the order of 5 ppb dissolved organic carbon (plus atmospheric gases) in the millipore filered water in lab. Can we taste/smell any of those things? Probably not very well, but maybe
you can certainly taste and smell a lot of things IN water, that have no bussiness being in water you're expected to drink. most are pretty subtle though, too much to be noticed unless you have water that is ACTUALLY from different places of verying water quality in front of you. you can certainly taste clorination/floridation. and sometimes even with it, what it is there to hide. and if you have that memory to compare it to, you can certain taste the difference if your up on top of a mountain drinking runoff directly from the snowpack, before anyone has had a chance to dump their household detergent in it, among other things. you MIGHT even be able to taste/smell the difference between filtered tap water, which is what most bottled waters are, and that high mountain spring runoff BEFORE it reaches the resivoirs. =^^= .../\...
Ha, just a side note: since bottled water is not officially regulated, bottled water is usually of WORSE quality than tapwater. Here in the US you can get good, clean tapwater pretty much everywhere. We should appreciate that much more than we do.
It might have have a 'taste' but if someone gave you a glass of water and asked you to say what drink it was, you would know that is was water.
well if you live close enough to where its bottled, its actually exactly the same because that is generally what it is. there is an occasional convenience to it, like to take on a road trip where you don't know the water where your going or something like that, or if you haven't already set aside your own and some natural vaguary like flooding temporarily messess up your water locally. i don't know about the worse part, other then if the bottled water had been allowed to go stale before bottling, which i suppose could happen. generally someone making a buck isn't going to do any more that costs any more then they absolutely have to in order to do so, so indeed, most bottled water is just bottled water. i think when the first started selling it they ran it through charcoal filters or something. those are fairly inexpensive and you can get those for your own water tap if you need them, but then most domestic water supplies in most parts of most better off nations, already are at least minimally filtered too. now there are artesian spring waters, and that's another matter, we had, when i lived in the foothills, a local spring water company that had an actual spring, you know, a place where water seeps out of the ground naturally, from an aquafer, in an isolated rock layer, that in this case was kept charged up by the snow melt from further up the hill all year long. then of course you can always distill water, or just boil it, to kill the bacteria, if you're where there's a problem with that, or, again after something unusual where there might be a problem with it. boil and then decant after letting it settle or otherwise from boiling you'll have increased the solid particulates. distilling of course gets around that, but then you have that tastelessness that comes from that level of near purity. which is of course usefull and neccessary for some noninternal consumption uses. there are times when bottled water makes sense, but they just arn't most of the time at all. most of the time, it's just another way to try and make something begin and end with little green pieces of paper that there's no sane reason for it to have to. and again, you CAN always boil and filter your own if you absolutely have to too. its no big rocket science mystery to do so. =^^= .../\...
i prefer the water that comes out our well, like yosef stated it might have minerals like calcium and iron etc... but to me it tastes way better then most bottled water, like that reverse/osmosis or whatever type water, blah it just tastes like dead water to me... its not alive, if that makes any sense.