by T J Neale

Created on: January 30, 2008   Last Updated: January 23, 2012

It depends on the quality of water coming out of your tap. Filtering our tap water definitely improves the taste of our food, tea and coffee. It also prevents kettles and the coffee maker from furring up and makes a famous local delicacy of Scummy Tea  a thing of the past.

Our home lies in the Chiltern Downs, north of London. Here in the English heartlands, the rolling chalk hills are a classic English landscape and picture book pretty. But our water is pumped up from an aquifer in the chalk. It contains lots of dissolved chalk and it is very hard. We have used a water filter for 15 years for all our drinking and cooking. We have to use special cartridges for hard water. The dissolved chalk is not a health hazard but it furs up pipes and appliances and it definitely affects the taste of any food and drink prepared with it. Everything tastes sharp, especially if you are not used to it. Visitors from outside of the area notice the taste immediately.

Now, I love coffee. In our kitchen there is an area dedicated to coffee making that would make a coffee shop manager cry. No way do I spend money in a coffee shop and neither do my friends. I am willing to pay for quality coffee when I can get hold of it. Blue Mountain Coffee is my definition of perfection. But there is no point in splashing out on quality coffee when the water affects the taste adversely. The hard water seems to kill the aroma as well. The loss of the beautiful coffee smell is enough to justify filtering the water on its own.

On summer days in these hills, you have to let the taps run for a while to get a glass of water that does not look like a glass of milk. Even then there is still plenty of chalk dissolved and when you boil the water a thin film of chalk floats on the surface. Unnoticeable until you use the water to make tea. Then the tannin in the tea stains the floating chalk brown, and the result the famous Chiltern Scummy Tea. Something tourists travel miles to avoid.

So we filter our water to get good coffee, no scummy tea and no furred appliances. Plus a bottle of filtered water kept in the fridge for making up fruit juice.

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