In certain cases and depending on the person, human taste and smell is an incredibly accurate chemical detector. https://www.sciencealert.com/this-woman-can-smell-parkinson-...
Low pressure, extremely hard to the point where soap is useless and we had to replace things regularly from scale build up, the UV filter thing we had to run in the basement, the worry that one day you could randomly lose the prime on the pump and they'd have to dig to get it back (which happened once), no fluoride so my teeth aren't the best.
Give me that carbon filtered (removes the chlorine taste) city water any day :)
I think a common misconception is that your water runs through the salt. In reality, the water runs through a filter and the salt water is used to periodically flush the accumulated metals out of the filter. This could lead to some residual salt, but it will get flushed away quickly. The other source of salty water is a busted valve. Replace it and the water will be fine again.
Where was this? Pumps are placed at the bottom of wells and avoid this problem entirely. It's physically impossible for a pump placed at the top to raise water more than 10m.
Toronto has chlorine plants and ozone plants.
(And from my darkroom days, I'm fairly good at nailing 20 °C with my fingers, so I just waited for the tap to give me the right temperature and then poured it straight into the pots.)
Seattle has fantastic city water. Most months of the year, Oakland water is very good (offer not valid for all combinations of reservoir and pipes, your mileage may vary).
Also, if you got used to something like iron or calcium enrichment, you might just not like those vintages, even if they're "objectively" good.
My dad commented specifically that he was impressed at the taste of our tap water, and thought it was an unexpected highlight of the trip.
We grew up on well water. Although by this point they were living "in town" so it is possible that their water has more chlorine, etc, than Toronto's. When I visit them, their tap water tastes dull (but not bad) to me, so there is that.
We knew that our taste buds (and smell receptors) are incredibly sensitive to small amounts of chemicals. It's somewhat unexpected that they could distinguish molecular weights.
It may tie in to the Vibrational Theory of Smell:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration_theory_of_olfaction
The standard theory of odor is that it's a lock-and-key process, like the immune system (and related to it). But there are some odd holes in that theory, like why sulfur compounds smell "alike", even though they're different keys fitting different locks (and we can't even exactly say what "alike" means).
This one guy suggests that it acts like a spectroscope, sensing the way atoms vibrate within the molecule. It's a brilliant theory that explains a lot of stuff, except that it's completely insane and there's nothing even vaguely like a biological mechanism that would enable it to work. He tried testing it with molecules that substituted deuterium for hydrogen, which alters the spectroscopic signature -- but got mixed results.
Smell and taste are only distantly related as mechanisms (taste is actually several very different mechanisms, and that's well-documented). This suggests that there's even more to it than that. Does this bring Luca Turin back? Dunno. He seems to have abandoned smell research entirely.
Deuterium is so much heavier than regular hydrogen that the bond lengths in D2O are shortened by enough (~3%) to affect cell chemistry. Also significant differences in boiling points and other physical properties.
if someone making a sandwich puts mustard on a sandwich and uses that knife to cut my bread, I can taste the mustard even though they wiped the knife. the % of mustard on my sandwich has to be very, very small.
people disagree with any water that tastes different than what they are used to and assume its bad. that's pretty much all it comes down to.
Really, up until a few generations ago, people tended to stay put and a family might drink from the same set of water sources for centuries. The only reason water would ever taste different is if something bad had happened to it.