Concord has been so dominant in the state’s competition for best-tasting drinking water that the city manager has compared its success to the great Boston sports dynasties of his generation. The capital city brought home the title of best-tasting tap water in New Hampshire in six of the last eight annual state competitions.
This past spring, in what could be deemed an upset, the town of Plymouth’s tap water came out the favorite. Concord water treatment staff didn’t learn until weeks later that, in fact, the city’s water had been disqualified from the test. As a result, they’re working with festival leaders, including the Department of Environmental Services, to create clearer rules. Still, both parties said, the contest is just for fun — Boston Celtics comparisons aside.
The taste test is put on annually by the New Hampshire Drinking Water Coalition at its annual festival — an educational event that teaches fourth- and fifth-grade students about how water treatment and pollution work. The discerning elementary schoolers in attendance blindly judge the contest, sipping water from paper cups and casting a vote for the one they like best.
There are a few rules: towns that submit their water as an entry must draw it from a tap on the day of the festival, and it’s not supposed to be iced or refrigerated at all.
Letting a sample sit for a while could allow some of the chlorine used to treat it to off-gas or waft away, taking some of its chemical flavor with it, explained Lara Hooper, the education coordinator for NHDES who also leads the drinking water coalition.
Similarly, the water samples are intended to be roughly room temperature because, simply put, “colder water tastes better,” she said. Chemically, the lower temperature makes it harder for taste buds to get hints of any undesired flavors, like chlorine or iron. Americans are also culturally conditioned to prefer iced water, Hooper added.
When the DES staff who were running the taste test started pouring out each water sample into the paper cups used for blind judging, they noticed immediately that Concord’s water seemed colder.
“There was lots of condensation on the pitcher,” Hooper said. “It arrived noticeably colder.”
Students were still allowed to sample and vote for Concord’s water, but contest officials ended up disqualifying it for being too cold.
Jack Keane, Concord’s water superintendent, said his team didn’t do anything different from its normal process of collecting the sample for the competition, as it has done for the last roughly ten years it has been participating.
“I’m not exactly sure what happened,” he said. It was possible, he offered, that the city’s clear well meant its water simply started out cold.
Hooper said the disqualification shouldn’t be read as an accusation that Concord tried to cool its water. Whatever the reason, she said, it was just too cold for the contest to be fair. She didn’t know, a few months after the fact, how Concord had fared in the raw vote from students before it was disqualified.
“The most disappointing part,” Keane said, “was not hearing about it until after.”
Hooper acknowledged that, unintentionally, she did not notify Concord about what had happened until about two months after the competition.
But there was also frustration around the contest’s rules. The parameters of water being not too cold and poured same-day had never really been policed, Hooper said. It was an honor system.
Concord struggled with how its water could have been deemed unfairly chilled when there was no rule establishing just how cold is too cold.
“There’s no set temperature,” Keane said. “So it seemed like kind of a gray area.”
Concord and DES are working together to draft new rules for the festival, ones intended to set more specific standards for how towns collect and submit their water samples.
“DES was very understanding,” Keane said.
The main goal, to him, was to clarify the rules so that no one would be disqualified going forward.
“I consider it all water under the bridge,” he said.
Concord’s pride around its winning streak in the drinking water contest is rooted in a pride for its water system and how hard the city has worked to keep it clean.
The city gets its water from Penacook Lake, where it has long banned all recreation and bought up all the surrounding property to protect the purity of the water source. Starting with cleaner water necessitates fewer chemicals to make the water safe to drink, which means the end product tastes better.
“It’s a phenomenal source of water,” Keane said. “It’s something the city should be very proud of.”
The festival has brewed a town-to-town culture of rivalry around it, Hooper said.
“The participating systems will readily admit that there’s friendly competition,” she said. “And it is friendly. It’s all in good fun.” Keane agreed.
Even though “it’s a fun, lighthearted contest,” he said, “any kind of award is a great thing.”
Still, Hooper said, it is important to remember that placing in the festival is not the same as national standards or examinations about drinking water quality.
Only four towns or cities – Concord, Hooksett, Manchester and Plymouth – entered the New Hampshire contest this year. Because the festival changes locations annually, cycling around the state, not every town enters every year. Towns on the seacoast, for example, are unlikely to enter their water in next year’s competition in Keene because of the distance.
In the end, Hooper emphasized, the taste test is about the kids, not the towns.
“This is a contest about teaching children that water can taste differently in different places and in different treatment systems,” she said. “It’s not about giving the communities kudos for having the best-tasting water.”
