Water, water everywhere

ANDREW JEFFORD entertains some impure thoughts as he discourses on the importance of water

Water matters ­ for earthlings. We live on the blue planet. Human beings themselves are nothing more than giant jugs of water on the move, cunningly sealed with bits of skin and hair and propped up with bones to stop them collapsing into a messy puddle.

Most of what we eat is water, and almost all of what we drink. Even neat spirits are more than 50% water. And water is just water, wherever you find it ­in a tap in Birmingham, in a glacier in Canada, or gushing out of the Perrier springs in Languedoc. So why do brewers and distillers make so much fuss about it?

Oddly enough, it is the impurities that we really treasure, despite the fact that "purity" forms a central plank in the sales pitch of most mineral waters. Absolutely pure (distilled) water tastes dull and flat. Mineral water is pleasant to drink precisely because it contains mineral impurities ­ like the 200mg/l calcium in Badoit or the 540mg/l sulphate in San Pellegrino.

I was put in mind of all this when Charles Wells recently announced that its water supply had been certified as a natural mineral water, and that Bombardier was therefore going to declare itself "the first premium cask ale in the country to be brewed using natural mineral water".

Sounds good, eh? But I can see it raising a smile from other brewers up and down the country, many of whom use equally-natural borehole or well water. Few brewers, in any case, ever leave water as it is: they make additions and subtractions to the recipe of impurities in a water (this process is sometimes described as "Burtonising") in order to get the water to perform well in the brewing context.

Indeed Charles Wells admits that "some adjustments are made for individual brews", though the company also claims that the constituent minerals of its water "have become profile characteristics of our beers and contribute to their distinctive taste".

In the whisky world, too, the issue of water is much lesssimple than it at first appears, as I quickly discovered when I set about researching Peat Smoke and Spirit: A portrait of Islay and its Whiskies (Headline, £18.99). "It's the water, stupid," is still the way many people would respond when asked what is the main factor in creating quality for Scotland's finest malts.

Yet Douglas Murray of whisky giant Diageo says that the critical importance of water "is the biggest myth that we, as an industry, have perpetrated". As it happens, all seven of the distilleries on Islay use absolutely natural water supplies. For six of the seven, that water is dark brown, having drained and dribbled through stands of heather and peat bogs before gathering in a loch or two and then being run down to the distillery; in the case of the seventh (Bunnahabhain), it is clear spring water, piped into place.

The peatiness or otherwise of the water, though, appears to have little to do with the peatiness of the whisky. Peat in water tastes vegetal, whereas the peaty flavour in whisky is actually a smoky note, put there by allowing the malt to dry in thick clouds of peat smoke.

Most distillers rubbish the idea that peaty water makes any difference at all to the final flavour of whisky, pointing out that the majority of the water will be discarded anyway (new-make whisky is usually distilled to about 70% alcohol by volume). The ex-distiller of Lagavulin told me the one change he would like to have made to the distillery would have been "to plug it into the mains. If there were any."

As it happens, I think they're being excessively prosaic; wherever flavour can leave a trace, it will, no matter how slight, and it is the totality of those slight and subtle traces which we enjoy in a glass of Lagavulin or Ardbeg.

For the same reason, I don't object to Charles Wells' using its water as a selling point. Even if the precise reasoning of the marketing department is shaky, the basic point is a good one; the original (and now almost unbelievable) importance of Burton-upon-Trent as a brewing centre was due to thegypsum-laden impurities of its own water, which is why brewers up and down the country attempt to replicate it still.

But let's be clear about one thing: purity's got nothing to do with it. It's the impurities that matter.