Lincoln's water a winner

KEARNEY, Neb. — It looked like moonshine poured from the little brown jug.

But Nebraska's newly anointed blue-ribbon drinking water — the Chardonnay of the tap, the Amontillado of the aquifer, the Perrier of the Platte — is legal and nearly free to everyone living in Lincoln.

Nebraska's best-tasting water flows from Lincoln taps, according to a friendly and unscientific competition Wednesday.

“We've always thought we had some of the best-tasting water,'' said Jerry Obrist, the city's chief water engineer. “We try to take good care of our drinking water.''

The Capital City quencher competed with entries from six other Nebraska communities: Aurora, Hastings, Norfolk, Omaha, Scottsbluff and Seward, plus a taste of bottled water to challenge the judges' deductive abilities.

(The bottled water failed the taste test miserably, organizers said.)

The competition was part of a happy hour mixer for young professionals attending the fall meeting of the Nebraska Section of the American Water Works Association. As five judges tasted, sniffed and examined each of the eight glasses placed in front of them, the audience relaxed with cans of light beer.

The first-time contest was conceived as a way to promote the work of Nebraska's public water systems in preserving and improving the state's drinking water, said Eric Obert, an environmental engineer with JEO Consulting Group of Wahoo, Neb.

One-gallon samples were collected no more than 48 hours before the contest and continuously stored at a temperature between 40 and 70 degrees.

They arrived in Kearney in an assortment of jars and jugs that could have come from a second-hand store. Lincoln had the brown jug. Scottsbluff and Hastings used glass cracker jars from Walmart. Seward used a spigot jar decorated with sunflowers. Aurora used a plastic distilled water jug.

Judges were presented with eight-ounce glasses of unidentified water. They were instructed to hold a few ounces in their mouth for several seconds, discharge it without swallowing and make an initial judgment on a scale of 1 (best) to 9 (poor).

They repeated the steps and made a final determination.

Lincoln's water has come a long way since the first public well was drilled in Market Square in 1875. The water then was too salty for drinking, but the artesian well gained a reputation for having curative powers, and people traveled from miles around to fill buckets and jars.

The first municipal water system well was sunk in 1883. Its pumping station was blamed for a typhoid fever outbreak and closed in 1912.

Salty water wells plagued Lincoln into the 1920s, and muddy-looking water upset customers in 1933.

Today, Lincoln's water is pumped from a Platte River well field near Ashland. Last year, more than 11.9 billion gallons of water was pumped to serve nearly 250,000 people who use an average of 33 million gallons a day.

Lincoln's winning entry was drawn directly from the Ashland treatment plant. Lincoln now will be nominated to compete in the national water-tasting competition, slated for Chicago in June.

For the six other communities, alas, there was no 2 in their H2O. Only the winner was named. The others — were out.

Contact the writer:

444-1127, david.hendee@owh.com