I don’t have a full answer, but I would expect taste to correlate much more with the water’s particular mineral content than anything to do with its safety. Different areas will have water that travelled through different rocks, and picked up a different profile of dissolved minerals.
Agreed: if the city tap water tastes bad, it could as easily because it has less of things you like the taste of as that it has more of things you dislike the taste of.
(Another possibility: the city tap water may be chlorinated. If this has any impact on taste it’s likely to make it worse, but it makes it less likely to contain waterborne bacteria that could be bad for you.)
I don’t have a full answer, but I would expect taste to correlate much more with the water’s particular mineral content than anything to do with its safety. Different areas will have water that travelled through different rocks, and picked up a different profile of dissolved minerals.
Agreed: if the city tap water tastes bad, it could as easily because it has less of things you like the taste of as that it has more of things you dislike the taste of.
(Another possibility: the city tap water may be chlorinated. If this has any impact on taste it’s likely to make it worse, but it makes it less likely to contain waterborne bacteria that could be bad for you.)