My family is from Israel, we recently visited Athens. We have excellent tap water in Israel, and we only drink water at home. No soft drinks and very little juices.

The tap was in Athens was, for us, extremely good tasting. We found ourselves constantly drinking the water, it was actually a treat to drink. We found it far better than either our own tap water, or the bottled water (Ein Gedi) that we bring with us when camping.

It can also be worse. I'd guess for almost everybody the difference in taste is dominated by the placebo effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIJEw5aDzOo

I mean, maybe to you it's a placebo effect, but I know I can at least smell the chlorine in my tap water... which I suppose isn't strictly "taste" but basically the same for the point of the discussion.

A lot of bottled water comes from municipal water plants (aka tap water).

That Penn & Teller YouTube link even has a section showing this, though you only need to go to the supermarket and look closely at the fine print of all the different brands of bottle water. You'll quickly find a lot are tap water.

"Tap" doesn't always have a uniform flavor, even in the same city. It's perfectly possible that bottled tap might taste better than the tap water at your house.

I was just in the US and I couldn't drink the bottled water, basically, due to it tasting terrible. The San Francisco tap water was surprisingly good when filtered, and I did find a brand called "Iceland Spring" or something similar that was good. Evian also has a consistently good taste.

That’s weird, I find Evian awful in every country I go to :)

yes a lot use tap water but they almost all invariable will go through a RO system and ozination and/or uv with some minerals added back in at the end for taste. the RO water with minerals tastes better to me than a natural spring water without that treatment. (used to work in water purification for a spell)

It would be silly to draw global conclusions based on one “test” that was setup for maximum effect on television.

I’ve lived in places with tap water that is definitely noticeable vs filtered/treated water. San Jose water for example is extremely hard and I suspect few people would mistake it for bottled.

That video is just a lot more fun than a traditional study, but here you go:

https://www.wine-economics.org/aawe/wp-content/uploads/2018/...

I guess you haven't lived in Los Angeles?

Guess away.

“Better” taste is subjective.

Many people have become familiar with the flavor of plastic, and learned to associate it with “purity” or “freshness” or “quality” or whatever.

I think this is untrue; there’s plenty of difference in water taste from region to region in countries, without having to suggest it’s the taste of plastic that people react to.

In NYC I always drink bottled water, where I’ll happily drink potable tap water in most places.

Wait, what? NYC has some of the best tap water in the country (barring some old buildings with bad pipes).