Bryan Tipton

In Dallas the water tastes like a swamp. It’s horrible and inescapable. When you take a shower or wash your face, you can smell the water. One of my rules regarding tap water – and I have few – is that it shouldn’t have perceptible odor. And it most definitely shouldn’t have an aftertaste. This unbearable taste creates a problem when you go to a restaurant – deciding on a beverage becomes an impossible task. You can’t drink the water, so you look for other options. You soon realize the invasiveness of the problem. It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. You know that your neighbor is a pod person. You escape him thinking that you’re safe, only to discover that he influenced others and now everyone surrounding you is a pod person too, and they all approach with their menacing, unrelenting saunter. You obviously can’t drink iced tea or lemonade. Oh, I’ll go with soda, you say? Nope. They water down the soda with the Satan-spawn H2O. Mixed drinks? Not if they’re made with ice. So what does that leave?

Beer.

Aaaah, beer. Sitting in a Bennigan’s at the Galeria Mall, the kind waitress that called me dear, honey, and sweetheart throughout my meal asked what I wanted to drink. “I’ll have a Guiness, please.” She asked me if I had a Unicard. No, I replied. She then explained to me that since this area of Dallas was a dry county that she couldn’t technically serve alcohol, but there was a loophole that allowed me to drink if I filled out a Unicard permit and had it on record. She brought me the form and said that the restaurant would pay the application fee. Yes, in order to drink beer in Dallas as to escape the wretched water, I had to fill out paperwork.

I have neither a sensitive nor picky palette, but I just couldn’t deal with the taste. It astounded me that there wasn’t a revolt in the city over the water. I was curious if I was the only one aware of it. I went online and did a few searches. I found a recipe that said if you were making this recipe in Dallas during the summer months, you needed to use bottled water due to the “off taste” the water acquired.

The reason the water acquired this taste? During the summer months the algae levels in the lakes grew dramatically.

Dallas… it’s called a filter.