Delicious Water is from Nature

Japan: Is there anything this island nation can't do to enhance beverage presentation and flavor? We've covered vac pots (although they aren't originally Japanese, very many of the manufacturers are) and we'll get to Ramune (I promise) and possibly Sake (parenthetical reference), but for now let's talk about water.

Water in its pure form, obviously, has three big problems: It is tasteless, odorless, and colorless. How awful. One day, perhaps, we'll be able to replace it with Brawndo. But until then, enter the Iuosen Pot, from Hario Glass. It fixes all three problems, giving water a delightful springwater taste, a river stone odor, and while it doesn't add any color to the liquid itself, it does pretty up a table both due to the striking design of the pitcher, and the colored rocks inside.

Inside the pitcher is a metal cage that holds binchotan charcoal and iouseki stones. Binchotan, or white charcoal, is made from oak cooked in caves sealed up with mud bricks. It's burned for a long time at a low temperature, and then heated to about 1000 degrees centigrade. It's the same stuff used to cook Kobe beef, because it's particularly odorless. More importantly, as far as dropping it in your water goes, it's exceptionally hard so it won't disintegrate. But why dump charcoal in your water at all? Well, binchotan is somewhat like activated charcoal, it's a porous carbonaceous material that can adsorb solutes in water, like chlorine and metals, and it softens the water. You have to let it sit for about 24 hours after you fill the pitcher, apparently, for the water to circulate enough for the charcoal to do its job.

Now let's get to the stones. The stones are what add the mineral flavor to the water. As an avid backpacker, I can tell you that water left in the pitcher for a few hours does resemble mountain stream water in odor and taste.

I've never heard of Iouseki. At first I just assumed it's made from delicious, delicious, depleted uranium. But then I found this in some online patent thingie for a purifying cartridge of some sort that may or may not contain science:

iouseki is famous as a medical stone and the two stones elute minerals, are porous and provided with strong adsorption force and ion exchange function and provided with an effct of removing bleaching powder smell, adsorbing and removing poisonous organic compounds and, at a same time, carrying out ion exchange in an alkaline direction with respect to pH of water. That is, minerals are added further to mineral portions of tap water and activated water good for human body can be finished.

Actually, there's a bit more. Relentless Googling leads me to believe that Iou-seki is a quartz diorite porphyrite. The "seki" means stone, and "iou" is sulfur. An Iou-sen is a sulfur spring, but fear not, the water smells nothing like farts or rotten eggs.

Ultimately, I won't vouch for the effectiveness of the pitcher in terms of water purification. I simply don't know enough about it, and the instructions are Greek to me. However, I can say with certainty that it's charming to look at, and makes delightfully delicious water. Moreover, as any number of my southern aunts might say: it's a conversation piece.

My wife gave me one of these for my birthday last year that she had to special order from who-knows-where. (She is resourceful and wonderful.) But they're now available from DWR (incidentally, who, exactly, is this design within reach of? Bill Gates? Steve Jobs? Joel Johnson?) for about $85. Or, if you're more adventurous, you can try picking up this similar model directly from Hario. Good luck with that.