What kind of Water in whiskey?

I use the softest water I can find - Volvic is very soft. You could also use a Filter ( Britta etc...) too filter your tap water.

@PeatyZealot: Filtered water works fine! I use Pure Rain (a brand) and it is just that; however, my stocks wont last forever and one of the major bottlers of mineral waters purchased this small company and sadly torpedoed the whole operation incl. removing the gathering apparatus and destroying it entirely. I think it sinful, to put it mildly, but that's what big business does!

You can gather your own rain, depending on where you live, but you will need to monitor the chemical content. In a true rural area rain is quite pure after a full days heavy rain, though your collecting surfaces need to be spotless.

Why bother? Pure Rain itself is soft and tastes best and (I think) marries better with Fine Malt Whisky.

Cheers.

My admiral (wife) and I use distilled water, we just didn't get good results from the garden hose. :)

Never plastic bottled water. Filtered tap water. Let it sit out overnight so the chlorine gas evaporates. IMO, room temperature water is better.

And if you want to get creative, add your water to the glass before your whisky. The flavor is a bit different and worth trying. Personally, I always taste my whisky first to see how much water I feel like adding. And I usually add water with a teaspoon.

Any sales pitch for water bottled in plastic bottles is BS, in my opinion. It certainly won't taste the way it did when it was bottled at the source after sitting in plastic for a few months or longer. Bottled water in glass bottles is different. That might be worth trying, especially if it is fluoride free and does not have chlorine added to it.

I live in Portland and it has some of the best water in the country. My parents have an artesian well that was drilled using a dowser. Their water is some of the best I've ever tasted. Absolutely delicious. And what's tragic is that they pour it into plastic jugs and keep it in their refrigerator. It ends up tasting like plastic. Out of their tap it's unbelievably good, but they've been conditioned to put it in plastic, like a great deal of the USA.

Right now, Portlanders are fighting hard to keep our water fluoride free. There's nothing worse than so-called "fluoride" to ruin the taste of tap water. The "fluoride" is always low grade chemical waste from fertilizer manufacturing, and so you can be sure it will also have its fair share of arsenic and plenty of other contaminants along with very low grade fluoride. It's bad for your health and bad for your whisky.

Fluoride free water is what the Scottish drink. It's also what 97% of all European countries have right now.

America is way behind the curve on this issue, and YES, drinking toxic waste does make a difference in terms of the way your tap water tastes in your whisky.

What cracks me up is when people with tap water that is mixed with toxic waster (fluoride) and chlorine choose bottle water in plastic as a way to really spruce up their whisky. That's like choosing one poison over another.

Plastic leaches all sorts of pollutants into water. After all, it's made from petro chemicals. Quite a few types of plastic also mimic estrogen in the body. That will certainly help you to grow some man boobs, and, over years and years of consumption, it will also gradually cause you to loose your gusto and become more of a girly man, while having the opposite effect on your girl, causing her to be a bit more manly and cranky. It's true: elevated levels of estrogen do that and many plastics do mimic estrogen in the body. They are also carcinogenic.

@A'bunadhman I live in the Netherlands... the rain is sour :(

@PeatyZealot After a little searching, the tap water here in Breda seems fine. Its soft and got some minerals just like most water from a well. Guess there is a reason why they never put high quality spirit in plastic, so feel Rigo on that one. I once knew a guy who always drank 1 part whisky with 2 parts sparkling water, but I don't think I'd like that

None for me, even at cask strength. I know, I know, there are advantages. For me, I think the addition of a drop or two of water makes it easier to nose, and the first sip a little better, but I always regret adding water by the time I get to the last few sips!

PeatyZealot you got me thinking about another aspect of water...pH. FWIW, i remember trying some very high pH water at 9.5 while making my starbucks coffee one day and it really smoothed things out, but almost to a fault with apparent loss of depth and bite. (for better or worse) Next time i get some high pH water again i will try with a CS dram. My faucet and bottled water is around pH of 6. Anyone know if maybe pH plays a role in taste as well? Just a thought.

@alteredstate: Absolutely! The pH. scale extends to 14 with pure neutral water having a pH. of 7; I (think) I can taste the difference when using a few drops of pure rain though with such a small amount I'm probably deluding myself - Anyway, for me, a few drops of rain achieves a lift in the nose without any major change in flavor profile.

Slainte!

I wrote a bit about this last year: bbblog.org.uk/2012/11/water/

I use filtered tap water - I taste tested regular tap water against filtered in whisky and could definitely taste a chemical tang in the unfiltered glass that wasn't particularly pleasant, so have stuck with filtered.

Personally, I believe that bottled water is a waste of money in most circumstances. If you're in a third world country and you can't trust the local tap water, stay away, but otherwise it's a needless product that does nothing but clog the Earth with garbage.

Same goes for scotch. I don't generally add water myself (I guess I'm a purist of sorts), but when I do it's just regular filtered water.

Er, I meant to say, "Unless you're in a third world country..."

Ooops.

I was surprised by the difference various water choices make. I usually buy a certain brand of bottled "spring" water and it suits most of the malts much better than tap water. But the best thing ever was rain water from my grandmas well paired with Corryvreckan (or anything peaty for that matter). Now to think of it, i have to visit my grandma more often...

@pirgo: You'll be surprised how long a gallon jar (glass) will last -A few drops here a few drops there...years!

Cheers.

I'm in NYC, where the tap water is soft. It gets filtered through a Brita water filter that I keep unrefrigerated. This seems to work just fine, although I've never made a comparison to anything else.