City has top drop on tap
Coast mixes it with best of best as state’s experts put supply to taste test
ANGEL tears, a whole meal, and old tyres are just some terms used to describe the best tap water in Queensland, and the Gold Coast has earned high praise.
The two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen solutions made it through regional finals to compete in QWater’s Best of the Best Queensland Water Taste Test at Gold Coast Turf Club yesterday.
About 60 testers from local governments across the state swilled and searched for notes from the “water tasting wheel – as used by professionals”.
These included: fishy, chlorinous, mouthfeel, sweet, flowery and earthy.
The last sample of the blind tests was described as “a whole meal and old tyres”.
That sample was from a bore out of Toowoomba which services 21 homes.
“It’s a little bit sulphery at the end,” said Gladstone Area Water Board chief executive Darren Barlow.
“At the back end of having it I am after a softness of the water and that you don’t get any residue or aftertaste.”
At the other end of the scale, only fractions separated the top three places, Mackay, Livingstone (at Yeppoon) and the Tugun Desalination Plant.
Toowoomba Regional Council principal engineer Jack Passier said the samples were distinctive.
“I’m looking for something that is not too earthy, not bitter, no aftertaste, but if it has an aftertaste that it is pleasant and sort of a soft water,” he said.
Whitsunday Regional Council chief operating officer and QWater vice chairman Troy Pettiford said he wanted a water that didn’t have a strong chlorine aftertaste.
“You want water supply that is pleasant and refreshing but (does) not have high calcium in it so it doesn’t make your shower screens all white,” he said.
Mackay won the contest, which greatly pleased its chief operating officer Nicole Davis.
“We get our water from the Pioneer River and then it gets clarified, it gets filtered and chlorinated and then goes into town,” she said.