According to the distillers, the taste of distilled water is actually the oxygen dissolved in the water. They recommend giving it a shake if it tastes 'flat.'

Depending on what container you store your distilled water in, it can leach flavours out of the metal or plastic that it's bottled in.

THEORY: Water (pure H2O, not counting the metallic taste of minerals etc) has taste and smell, but not for animals and humans as we are largely made up of water, we breathe large quantities of water vapor, and almost everything we eat/drink contains large amounts of water. It is natural to us and therefore "has no taste". This isn't a fact, just a theory/speculation that I have


Answer: No. In order for it to be water, it has to be colorless, odorless and tasteless. The things you taste is not the water, but the things that are in the water. If it has a taste, it's not 100% pure water.

Eh, you're confusing molecules with atoms. Water molecules contain oxygen atoms, yes, but oxygen gas also dissolves into water. Your "pure" water is an H₂O and O₂ solution, and the point of the shake is to keep the oxygen in solution to maintain taste.

An oxygen molecule is very reactive, the oxygen atoms are keen to seek bonds with atoms other than each other, so the distillers are saying that oxygen dissolved in water will bond to your taste/smell receptors. A water molecule is very inert, those hydrogen atoms doing a great job of satisfying oxygen's need for bonding, so it doesn't bond to your receptors.

The theory I posted makes sense. Water will in fact have a taste. But since we are mostly made up of water to us it is tasteless. So to us, water has no taste.

Aww screw it, water in it's pure form is tasteless. But it is next to impossible to get it in it's pure form, so for all intents and purposes, drinking water does have taste, that is of course due to any additives in it.

Both reverse osmosis and distilled water should be virtually tasteless. The things that generally give water a "taste", like chlorine and dissolved minerals are removed during either process.

Tap water of course is another story.

It has more to do with the plastic leaching into the water. I hate bottled water.

We only "think" we only taste impurities in water, when in fact it probably has a taste unknown to us (???).

Meh. It probably does have a taste, maybe so minute we don't detect it, or we're so tolerant to it we don't detect it.

EDIT: And this shows how stupid Section 8 is. Not very secretive, is it?