More than sure, each of us was told from childhood that boiled water should never be diluted with “raw” water - that is, unboiled water. "Prononce" of the stomach, at least, will be provided! And then some other unpleasant ailments.
To be honest, I was always surprised by this statement. Especially in the village.
We children, in violation of all sanitary standards, blew "raw" water from wells and columns, while eating it unwashed unripe berries (maybe this is a magic combination?) and at the same time no one has ever even a hint of an upset stomach suffered.
The adults did not lag behind - in almost every house there was a bucket of water, and next to it was a ladle. If you want to get drunk, you fill the bucket with water from this bucket and just drink.
But as soon as we (children) tried to dilute the tea, which is too hot, in our opinion, or compote, with water "Raw", grandmothers and grandfathers harmoniously grabbed the hands of some for the heart, some for the tin and began to repeat about dangers.
Is it strange? And then!
No, in principle, I understand perfectly why boiled water should not be diluted "raw". All the same, intestinal infections (and, probably, not only intestinal ones) are transmitted through water only on the way. Cholera, dysentery, rotavirus - what else have they suffered over the centuries?
However, I noticed a strange thing: despite the fact that the water in our house is most often bottled, when my son tried to dilute the tea with water from a bottle in front of my eyes, I was shocked - it was raw! And, meanwhile, bottled water of cholera and other vibrios should not contain at all, that is, it is safe. And there should be no impurities in it, as in a tap.
I decided to check, maybe I shouldn't have forbidden the child to regulate the temperature of drinks like that?
Tea was the object of the experiment. Plain black tea. Not packaged. I won't tell the brand - because I bought it in a tea shop by weight.
Once, at one of the master classes, I was doubled by the assertion of an expert that it is impossible to add raw, even pasteurized milk to tea - the taste will change for the worse. In general, there were a lot of nuances, but... If the case with milk is more or less clear (there, after all, lactose, milk fat and many more components), then water - what the hell is the difference, especially if it's purified?
But no, it turned out.
The simplest addition of just thirty milliliters of water to a cup of freshly brewed tea did:
The taste is flat, although if you add the same amount of boiling water, the taste of the tea just softened (and even then a little).
The color is dirty. Moreover, the color change did not occur instantly, but within a couple of minutes. Nothing of the kind happened when adding boiled water. When adding boiled chilled - too.
It provoked the appearance of a pronounced film, also within a couple of minutes. Remember the tea film? It usually appears on cooled, steeped tea for a long time. And here - "just add water."
Bottled water was used and, of course, it can be declared poor quality (I will not name the brand, because I don’t think so, and I don’t want to do advertising or anti-advertising).
I tried to find an explanation for these phenomena, and, to be honest, it didn't work out very well. When it is forbidden to mix raw and boiled water, the bacterial population of "raw" water is everywhere mentioned. True, some argue that water subjected to heating has a different structure of the crystal lattice (the journal "Science and Life", #10 from 2011, article "Water structure: new experimental data"? author - candidate of chemical sciences Alexander Smirnov, professor at MIREA). A different structure can change properties.
Therefore, I think the ban on using a mixture of raw and boiled water is quite reasonable. I don't know what about the infection, but the taste of drinks based on boiled water, raw - really changes not for the better.