Friday, September 01, 2006

Preheating a vessel with water

Preheating a vessel.... A difficult achievement for me for living in Southern California. After a girl friend of mine did an extensive research on water quality on the web, she discovered that the best quality of drinking water are not from a bottle, rather filtered water with complex filtration system - at home or water vending machine. I don't have the luxury of having such a unit in my apartment. So filling up jugs and jugs of water became routine. I tried a few vendors, my favorite is Glacier - vending machine at supermarkets. It includes 6 filtering processes. The water taste sweet by itself. These machines are well maintained with a scheduled filter change and testing.

A vendor at the Vegas Tea Expo was selling these commercial filtration units, they claim the process will first remove all the chemicals of tap water, then remove ALL the minerals, ultra violet light for killing germs and bacterias, then more filtering, then ADD a combination of essential minerals back into the water as a final process. The system cost $2500 each and a maintenance fee of $400 every 3 months for changing filters. Pretty steep eh! Home units start within a couple of hundreds, around $50 for changing filters every 3 months.

Well, my point being carrying large jugs of water is problematic for me. It's how I broke my finger a few weeks ago! A 3 gallon (I dare not to use a 5 gallon jug) jug full of water fell off the back of my hatch back, I was convinced my hand can withhold the weight of 25+ lbs flying off at a speed multiplied by gravity. What a girl would do for a cuppa good tea!

I am a bit of a Jew when it comes to preheating a vessel, the constant reminder of my still painful swollen finger. Filling up a vessel only half way is as generous as I could be, I know it's not sufficient, BUT.... I'll be generous when I install a unit in my future home.

6 comments:

~ Phyll said...

What do you think of the reverse osmosis vending machine outside of supermarkets ($0.25/gl)? Many times already I thought it gives very good result with my pu-erhs. But somebody said that it's not good because the water coming out of such vending machine is as good as distilled water, stripped of all minerals.

I've never seen Crystal Glacier water here in LA (maybe I have, but didn't pay any attention to it). However, one of my favorites water is Crystal GEYSER...available at Whole Foods too.

Also good: Trader Joe's New Zealand artesian water, Fiji and Volvic, imho.

~ Phyll said...

Wait, duh, the Crystal Glacier you mentioned is an expensive filtration system...sorry. I thought you were talking about the bottled water.

Vegas Tea Expo? When was that? How was it?

Imen said...

Phyll,

My bad for the confusion. It's Glacier without Crystal. It's the blue vending machine outside of supermarkets. They do give good results for my tea. Here is an article about a law suit against Glacier water:

http://www.ewg.org/reports/vendedwater/newsrelease_20021210.php

This was back in 2002. Hopefully they have improved. In general I am quite satisfied with the quality.

From what my girl friend had found, prepackaged water went through a similar process just like the vending machines, and they are not as publicly examined as the vending machines, therefore quality control is somewhat less controlled. Plus god know how long have they been on the selves after it's packaged. It's more stagnant and prone to bacteria. Some claimed to be spring mineral water, but actually just altered tap water. No one knows for the fact whether it's authentic spring water.

something to know about Glacier water:

http://www.glacierwater.com/quality.htm

Imen said...

Vegas tea expo was held in Hilton back in April. http://www.worldteaexpo.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=32&Itemid=53

Majority of the vendor are selling popular green, herbal, floral teas, only a handful of vendors have premium tea or rare tea.

Taooftea.com had a couple of good tea. One of them is a winter 2005 Dong Ding ooglong. I just remember it was nice, but not the specifics. Another one is very unique, a Darjeeling process as Ooglong with high fire roasting. It was quite unforgettable in experience, then again, I can't remember the specifics.

The intention of the expo is aimed toward resellers, not so much for tea crazy people like us bloggers. There were cooking lessons using tea infused ingredients, auctions, many seminars about increase sales. It's interesting enough to spend a day. I'll go again for sure.

~ Phyll said...

Thank you for the information, Imen. I hope your finger is healing very nicely.

Imen said...

Thanks Phyll! It's been 3 weeks, it's not healing as quickly as I'd hoped to be... still swollen and inflexible, the pain is hard to ignore too...