Water is best served room temperature, not ice cold. Do not @ me.

A journalist's job is to tell the truth even if that truth is hard to swallow. Speaking of: You know what else is hard to swallow? A glass of ice-cold water when you're thirsty.

Let me state the truth and state it plain: Water is best when it's served room temperature. Big Fridge has you fooled. Brita pitchers have bamboozled you. The ice lobbyists have melted your ability to reason.

I arrived at this truth like a lightning bolt striking me down. Parched from a jog, I chugged a glass of water that had been left by my computer before the run. That was fucking GOOD, I thought, water slaps when you're thirsty. But then I realized it tasted better becauseit was tepid. It wasn't freezing and numbing my entire mouth as I gulped it down. The fact that it was room temperature was a feature, not a bug.

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Like any good blogger, I tweeted about it. Immediately I began to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Responses online ranged from "what the fuck" to "I don’t even know who you ARE anymore."

When my colleagues were presented with this truth — in the form of a story pitch — my own beloved coworkers began to cancel me in Slack and cancel me HARD. Now to be clear, cancel culture is mostly a made-up thing by people with bad opinions who don't want consequences for said opinions, but in this instance, yep, you guessed it, I was the victim of canceling. My colleagues wanted to write a counterpoint to my blog.

And yet, I feel comfortable saying my coworkers and most of my bosses are completely and utterly wrong, and in denial because the truth is so upsetting it would probably rock their whole worldview.

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Is it better to drink cold water?

A thought exercise: Think back to the best gulp of water you've ever had. Really imagine it. Be in that moment. Picture August heat, summer skin lightly kissed by the sun, mouth and throat itchy and dried. You grab a glass of water. You bring it to your lips and...is the water you picture 37 degrees? Does it freeze your mouth upon the first gulp? Does it dull your tongue and freeze your brain? STOP LYING, NO IT DOES NOT. That glass of perfect water was pulled directly from the tap, it was happily gulped, and in that moment you felt perfectly sated. If only water could always taste that way.

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It can, baby. Welcome to the light. And guess what, the experts agree. Martin Riese, thepreeminent water sommelier, agrees that water is best served at room temperature. Cold water numbs your taste buds, he explained in an August 2020 video, which dulls the experience. It's kind of like singing the roof of your mouth with hot pizza — after that everything tastes meh.

"When you put ice cubes on your palate you're numbing all the aromas," he said. "You can't really taste anything anymore. Therefore, please drink you water [at] room temperature. It's way better. It's tastier."

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What can I say, I guess I'm a culture gourmand with great taste? I cannot be fooled by Big Fridge because I am a truth-telling intellectual.

And just to be clear, Riese and I are not alone. While most people online seem to be against room temp water, some people do agree with the truth. Water brand Svalbarði surveyed water sommeliers and, without exception they agreed water is most flavorful at about 68 degrees Fahrenheit, which is considered the average room temp.

"In our survey of water sommeliers, they unanimously agreed that room temperature is optimal to appreciate water flavour at its fullest," the Svalbarði blog read.

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Tweet may have been deleted

The blog did note that if you drink ice-cold water you might just be tricking yourself into thinking you're refreshed.

"For many, the taste of the water is irrelevant, as they seek the sensation of stimulating refreshment," it read. "A research paper about oral cooling published by the NCBI in 2016 explains that when feeling overheated, cold water around [43 degrees Fahrenheit] provides a feeling of energizing refreshment."

Even if your don't care about taste and just want to trick your brain into feeling refreshed, your fridge water is still too cold. Most fridges run about 37 degrees Fahrenheit.

And warning about cold drinks. There was a study that concluded "cold liquids should be considered a potential trigger for fatal cardiac arrhythmias in patients with underlying heart disease," meaning overly cold drinks can actually be dangerous, even if it's rare.

Still, I get you might not dive head-first into the room-temp world. You think ice-cold water is better because you've been conditioned to believe that. You've seen ads with condensation dripping down bottles. You've been served ice in your water without even being asked. And you like water, so you must like ice water, right? Sorry, but you're wrong.

Don't you like taste? Don't you want the full experience of Earth's most precious resource? Wouldn't you love to take a big heaping gulp of delicious, refreshing water without your mouth plummeting to the temperature of your fridge?

I can imagine some of you read all this way and you still don't trust the truth. I understand. It's hard to accept. You can keep living in Big Fridge's world if that suits you.

After all, there is that old saying: You can lead a horse to room-temp water, but you can't make them drink.

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