I thought I’d piggyback on Mr. T’s work to ensure we gave fair coverage to more than one beverage. I actually have a couple different things to say.

• A year or two ago, when gas was $4 a gallon, someone mentioned that people are furious paying $4/gallon for gasoline, but merrily pay $2 for a 16 ounce bottle of water, which is $16/gallon. Consider that one comes out of the faucet and is basically free, and the other involves negotiating with third-world cartels and massive amounts of refining.
• Am I the only one that can’t drink water in restaurants? I think most restaurants use a little chlorine (?) in their water to keep things clean and sanitary. Except that I take a sip, feel like I’m drinking pool water, and spit it out all over the table*. It’s revolting. Not only that, but most places use the same water in their soda; if it’s light chlorine, it’s alright, but in some places, I can taste it in my soda, which is even more distressing to me. The thing that I don’t get is that it’s really easy to filter water. We have some fancy machine at work that’s sort of like a water bubbler hooked up to a sink, but it claims to use charcoal filters**, UV rays, and reverse osmosis. And that’s what water should taste like: nothing. I’ve started to drink it often. This is surely overkill, too. Throw a cheap filter in line with the water you’re serving to your customers, and voila! Strangely, there seems to be no correlation between restaurant quality: even in a place where you pay $50/person for dinner, their water might as well have been taken out of the toilet.

* Tremendous hyperbole. I furrow my brow and stop drinking the water.
* I am not a chemist, but doesn’t it seem counter-intuitive that running pure water through charcoal makes it cleaner?