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thewestern · 10 months

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Chapter 8

Hildegard … if you have a moment … I’d like to speak with you about the family and my role going forward.

Oh, Billy. How many times must I repeat myself? Call me Mother or Mom or not at all. Please.

Billy had been patiently waiting for the perfect moment to present to Hildy, his mother, his strategic vision, settling for some time between the third and fourth course. That afforded him almost an hour of silence to refine his pitch in his head. He never made written notes. I’m straight off the dome, like Hov and Weezy, as he once assured his sixth-grade English teacher before presenting to the class on The Hobbit.

Imma Bilbo Bag-Chaser / On a quest for Bling / Ur bitch on my dick like Gollum / Kiss the mother fucking Ring

As her son prepared to pitch her, Hildy thought of Fräulein Loebl, something she seldom did. How she would provide weekly status reports to Opa at the dinner table. They kept their affair an open secret. Even to an eight-year-old, who didn’t know what sex was, it was obvious this woman and her grandfather were making it. Her intestines tied in knots over at the repressed memory of the Fräulein erotically slicing his Weisswürste (white sausage), never once breaking eye contact. Since their deaths, she resolved to never stomach another Schweinshaxe or Semmelknödel. Hildy favored a lighter fare, and had a more worldly palate than her Opa, beside. So, as a compromise with herself for keeping Wilhelm I’s legacy on life support through the tradition of Sonntagsessen (Der Hunger des Wolfes gehört uns), Hildy installed a rota of her most favorite restaurants and eateries, contracting them to cater out of the early twentieth-century kitchen at the Wolffenhaus. For this Sunday’s installment, executive sushi chef Tatsahiro Fuji took the night off from his day job at Fōku (you really shouldn’t go for sushi on Sunday anyway), the hottest restaurant in town, to prepare a Sashimi tasting menu just for Hildy and Billy.

As for the latter, despite having been raised with ready access to all the finest cuisines, Billy had remained among the cursed realm of adult picky eaters. In addition to legumes, multi-grain breads and all manner of soups, one of the food groups he hated absolutely was Fish (he was undiagnosed pescaphobic); as to how anyone could enjoy it raw, he was confounded, utterly. But no bother. An empty stomach sharpens the mind (-Marcus Aralias), he thought to himself, scavenging around the edges at some white rice. Time to Enter the fucking Dragon, Billy. Thirty-six bathrooms of the Wolffenhaus. Mother fucking, Bruce Lee, bitch.

Thank you, Mother, for your time. I brought us here today to talk about the future of the company as it relates to the emerging craft and on-premise retail segments, which I believe it does.

Billy’s knee rattled beneath the table; his throat was bone dry. Hopefully he wasn’t having an allergic reaction to whatever sauce was touching that rice, he fretted, the sweat pooling on his temples. Pausing to compose himself, he took an unusually long drink of water.

Hildy wore an expectant look of surprise. She rearranged herself in her seat, as if to make a show of listening, and waited for her son to hamfistedly proceed in making the request she was already certain to deny.

As you know, regarding our Beverage Advancement Division, though our product development and go-to-market strategies have been mostly sound, our new entrants have struggled to achieve widespread adoption amongst our target demographics.

The Beverage Advancement Division, to which Billy was referring, was an offshoot of a subsidiary department to R&D that he had run on a trial basis for the past eighteen months. Hildy hand-placed him there, close enough to the core business, for appearances’ sake. Much as she’d sometimes like, she couldn’t stow her son away somewhere in the back office … He was a Wolff, after all. But, he was kept at an arm’s length-enough away to prevent his inflicting any real damage to the company's reputation and/or the family stock price.

Yes, dear. I’m well aware of the Full Moon, and its resultant failure to launch. Hildegard, We Have a Problem, was I believe the headline in Advertising Era. Or was it: Houston, We Have a Pale Ale?

Full Moon Pale Ale was the Beverage Advancement Division’s latest aborted attempt at astroturfing its own proprietary craft beer revolution. Past iterations included: Rabid Dog Irish Red, Big Bad Brown Ale, and Uber Wolff Select. Billy had taken his first turn at the helm with the much-ballyhooed debut of Full Moon Pale, which signaled a marked departure from prior strategy. Leading a team of the best and brightest among the Wolffenbeir brand management brain trust, Billy grinded harder than he ever had before. Twelve-hour days, six days a week, for three months. Yes, of course, he spent a not insignificant allotment of that time playing Brick Blaster, online shopping and watching Internet porn on his work computer. But … he was In The Office, so you do have to hand it to him. Also, don’t question his creative process.)

Then in one moment, all of a suddenly, it came to him.

Guys, why are we trying to reinvent the wheel here?

Instead of standing up a new category, creating awareness and affinity out of whole cloth, they pivoted: to identifying a brand which had established credibility in the craft beer space — namely, Rider, Pale by the New Frontier Brewing Company. It was a tactic Billy stole from his friends in the tech space called, Fast Following. Really it was a fancy way to say Copying. But in fairness, Russ had been fairly forthcoming about Rider being the Newfy’s level best attempt at Paying Homage to Hairy Uncle Harold, a bloody brilliant Extra Special Bitter, brewed in the Beer World-famous town of Burton Upon Trent, in the borough of East Staffordshire in the West Midlands of England. So it was more like Billy was copying a cop.

Working in shifts, a crack team of flavor chemists (flavorists) embarked to reverse engineer the R,PA recipe. Right out the gate, they were tripped up by the water, of all things. Ironic, you see, since Water was something of a differentiator for Wolffenbeir proper. Wilhelm I had been very savvy to purchase a land conservation easement granting exclusive usage rights to the Washita Watershed, filled in large part by the cirque glaciers in Big Monument National Park. This before it became public land thanks to that tinhorn president, as Wilhelm I would have no doubt called Teddy. Private land ownership is the founding principle of this country! This poppycock notion of Nationalized Parks … It’s Pure Bolshevism!

Is your beer Glacier cold? The old Wolffenbeir commercials used to end in the form of a question. (Chosen over the call to action: Lick the Glacier.) Russell hated those damn adverts. Every so often a smart-ass customer would rib him, hey Russ, how come this beer isn’t Glacier Cold? Yuck, yuck … yuck. To them he would reply, it’s as cold as your mother’s black heart before I screwed her pink back warm, you cunt fucking prick. Schehrer had a weird (bad) sense of humor and a short temper — a perilous combination in most customer service scenarios.

As for Full Moon Pale, their problem had nothing to do with water temperature. You can adjust that at your discretion. Rather it was the composition of the water, which one can also change, but not nearly as easily. Here is something that any brewer worth his or her magnesium sulfate understands: there is water that is Hard, and there is water that is Soft. Per exempla: the water in Burton on Trent, the pre forementioned Beer Mecca of Britainia. That water — flowed through the sediment-rich River Trent (not to be confused with the Trent River, its American cousin, that traverses parts of Jones and Craven Counties in the coastal plain region in eastern North Carolina) — is Hard Water, meaning that it possesses a higher mineral content. For a hop-forward ale, such as an American IPA or an English bitter, the alkalinity of Hard Water is an ideal complement to more a expressive flavor and aroma profile. Meanwhile, the water down there in Bohemia and Bavaria — run off up from them Alps — is Soft Water, insofar as it has a lower mineral content. For a more malty lager, such as a Czech Pilsner or a German Helles, the acidity of Soft Water is optimal for showcasing that lighter, crispier taste.

So then in summation, hard water is a little rockier-tasting than normal water. Soft water, on the other hand, is more watery water. What’s fun is you can tell for yourself what kind of water there is where you live, Russ relished to point this out whenever he mansplained pH values in brewing, which was more often than one would care to hear. Next time you’re in the shower, if your soap is super foamy and bubbly, and it won’t wersh off very easy — you’re in a place with Soft Water. If the opposite is true, and you’re having a hard time getting a good scrub going — you’re in a place where the water is hard. If you’re singing in the shower and you get soap in your mouth, then it’s a soap opera.

For his part, Russ often showered sans scrubbing. The pathetically low water pressure in his apartment wasn’t conducive to full exfoliation. That being said, he almost always washed with foam in the form of a beer, or preferably two. (Shower beers are like breasts, he would say. One isn’t enough; two is just right. Three is too many and four is a party.) The juxtaposing sensations of the hot water pitter-pattering at his weather-beaten skin, and the cold beer rinsing down his throat, permanently horse from all that yelling he did … well … if he were to make it through the day long, this was about the finest way he saw fit to start.

(Russ had the most gorgeous, gravelly singing voice nobody ever heard unless they were in earshot of his one bathroom after about that fourth shower pop.

Oh, I, oh I'm still alive

Hey, I, oh I'm still alive

Hey, oh

[Wet belch arpegio])

Same as in his shower, for all the Newfy beers, including R,PA, Russ used City Water, which possessed all manner of mineral content. (Come to find many years later one of the primary elemental compounds therein was fucking lead [Pb] … yikes.) Anyways, the eggheads at Wolffenbeir were using that glacier water from the Washita Watershed, which as we know was pure as the driven snowpack it melted from. Now you can treat that water with various salts and other compounds to harden it back up, but you won’t get exactly that gravel quarry mouthfeel of a Proper Ale. One that tastes like Eddie Vedder sounds. No, you won’t get that at Wolffenbeir. Not in a facility built for brewing At Scale. We’re talking in the hundreds of thousands of cases here. It’d be like trying to make one of Hildy’s fancy-pants European cars on a Detroit assembly line. That dog doesn’t hunt.

Please don’t worry if any of that was confusing, because water chemistry also was not the riptide upon Full Moon Pale waned. (Or would it be waxed?) It’s true they couldn’t achieve the desired Hard Water Effect, and the beer tasted mighty soft for it … But, hey, that’d never stopped them before, baby. Quick: What do Wolff Light and sex in a canoe have in common? Russ loved this one … They’re both fucking close to water!

No, the content of the beverage itself — a watery grave taste with that famous bloated corpse finish — was a complete nonfactor in the Total Eclipse of FMP. (I fucking need you more … THAN EVER.) But wait … If the quality of the product was immaterial to its success in the marketplace, how could it have possibly failed? Thankfully, for the sake of closure, all deceased brands receive a sort of autopsy, so as to determine the manner of death. In this case, results from postmortem social listening sessions indicated that Howler — the cartoon moon-faced mascot plastered onto every can, bottle, tap handle, in-store display … really any conceivable flat or cylindrical surface — had tested very negatively. Like, shockingly so. They Loathed Him. Howler. Multiple survey respondents were quoted as saying that his wry grin appeared Menacing. As if he was watching them, and would continue to do so late into the night as they slept. Staring into their dream state, with a zero-gravity gaze. The way his lunar crater-like eyes — black, the color of deep space — peeked out, just so, from atop the acetate frames of his wayfarers which hung suggestively there on the bridge of his aquiline nose. Even though he didn’t even have a nose. So how were they suspended there? And why on earth would the moon be wearing sunglasses anyway?

One night during Howler’s reign of terror, Hildy was being chauffeured home from a fundraiser at a private home in the foothills, benefitting the Collegiate Academy of Scientific and Technological Excellence. She was the distinguished chair of the independent board of directors for SciTech, which it should be said enjoyed complete autonomy from the publicly-elected school board district. Having once herself been abjectly denied the opportunity to pursue her passion for the Sciences, she was committed to ensuring that access to STEM education was available to all young people, especially young females.

Taking the shortcut she found so distasteful, Hildy saw from out of her panoramic sunroof, He was glaring down atop a massive billboard above the freeway. My heavens, is that one of ours? She asked in horror to her male companion for the evening, Mayor Mockingbird. It was the first she’d seen of Howler, who was even more off-putting in person, standing a full fifteen feet in diameter.

A marketing blunder the magnitude of this should have been quite easily avoidable. For a fact, the pre-launch focus grouping reached the same statistically significant conclusions about the Howler prototype. That he was Eerie, Ominous, Sinister, Awful, Ghoulish, Macabre. (Question: What do these things all have in common?) However, it was Billy who had personally buried that damning report from ever seeing the light of day. More than any other component of the product development phase, he had taken ownership over the Brand Aesthetics — colors, fonts, and specifically the graphic design of the wretched Howlie. Billy spent days in meetings and on calls, going back and forth with the creative agency of record, obsessing over the most minute details — he went to the mat for the shades. Tortiously he pondered the frames. Should they be tortoiseshell or matte black? As for the high stark unfavorablities, well, Howlie was slightly ahead of his time. Temporarily misunderstood. They’ll see. They have to see.

###

The tragic failure of Billy requires some familial context. His mother, Hildy, had made her bones with the company as a young marketing executive on the heralded debut of a new product line called Wolff Light. You know, while we’re at it, the advent of light beer is itself a funny thing. Around that time, Morning in America, or thereabouts, it became fashionable for one to look after one’s health and fitness. Jogging emerged as the modus transportari du jour. Prior to that period, no one had ever thought to run. Not recreationally. Likewise, you started watching what you e’t — heretofore unheard of in the preceding millennia of Human History, when one would eagerly devour whatever he could well get your grubby mitts on. The modern marvel of factory farming allowed for diners to be more nutritionally discerning. The same went for drinking. Turned out a ten-ounce can of beer could pack quite a caloric punch. Hence the consumer clamoring for a beer that was … Lighter.

Inspired by the cigarette ads of her youth — Did you know that four out of five physicians smoke Red Apple? A pack a day keeps the doctor away! — Hildy had the bright idea of playing to the heightened health consciousness percolating in the consumer marketplace. Finding a licensed practitioner of any credibility to endorse the therapeutic benefit of an alcoholic beverage would have proved difficult. (Not impossible.) Thus she created the cartoon clinician we all know and love, Doctor Lupus, M.D. Let’s set the scene. Interior: doctor’s office. A procession of big-eyed woodland critters scurries in one by one — a bunny with an earache, a skunk with a sinus infection, a chipmunk with a chipped tooth. (In addtion to specializing in otorhinolaryngology, apparently he also practiced dentistry, as a side hustle, perhaps.) Irrespective of their affliction, Doctor Lupus prescribes them each one pint of Wolff Light, surgically pouring it from the bottle into a tall, frosty syringe. The punchline reveals via a pile of skeletons that Doctor Lupus — a wolf in sterile clothing — has been eating his patients — picking them bone-clean and washing them down with his own glass of Wolff Light. Then cut to black and the tagline: Wolff Light … Just What The Doctor Ordered. (This preceded the Glacier Cold campaign. Wolff Light has had several slogans, it should come as no surprise. Wolffenbeir Heavy, as it was unofficially known, only ever went by the one, printed in script: The American Standard.

Television audiences couldn’t get enough of Doctor Lupus, who became an overnight sensation. Lupus-Fever, as it was called in the pages of TV Guide. Capitalizing on the Feeding Frenzy, as the phenomenon was alternatively called by TV Guide, the Wolffenbeir Company hired a professional mascot to dress up in a plush wolf costume and sent him on a globetrotting goodwill tour. He was invited on late-night talk shows, threw out the ceremonial first pitch at baseball games fetched six-figure speaking fees for cush corporate gigs. Christ’s sake, he met the fucking Pope.

At the absolute tipping point of his pop cultural saturation, Lupus made a cameo appearance on a nationally televised weekend sketch comedy show, performing a bit lampooning a real life pathologist who had recently achieved universal infamy for performing physician-aid-in-dying procedures using his Suicide Machine (patent pending), sparking a contentious debate on the appropriate role of Euthanasia in compassionate palliative care.

Then, somewhere along the way, Doctor Lupus emerged as somewhat of an unlikely Sex Symbol. Men wanted to be him. Women wanted to be with him. Beginning with the model-actress Brooke Shields, who made a splash at the Golden Globes when she walked the red carpet with Hollywood’s Hottest Wolf, himself dressed to the canines in full black tie. A publicity stunt? Quite possibly. Regardless of the romantic legitimacy of their celebrity relationship, the renewed tabloid attention measurably helped to revive her career, which was previously on life support. (Shields subsequently booked the popular sitcom, Suddenly Susan.) As for Lupus, as soon as he was established to be an object of interspecies sexual desire, his campaigns started pushing all boundaries of acceptability. Naturally, there were the Wolff Light Nurses, his harem of buxom blonde, human women. All credit to those gals for managing to carve out a niche of their own, making paid appearances at certified pre-owned car dealerships, minor league hockey games, that sort of thing. It was a decent living. Obviously nowheres near DL scratch. By now his money was Real Good. Enough to afford a Malibu beach house, a paddock of sports cars and a fully blown sex addiction. Part and parcel to a broader heel turn that was reflected in his commercial output. Notably, a later period tv spot was constructed around the conceit which, if you didn’t drink Wolff Light, then Doctor Lupus will fuck your wife.

Kids loved him too. He was the most popular Halloween costume ten years running. His Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon towered above all others, levitating six stories tall, and half a city block long, held afloat by some ninety handlers. (In what’s considered to be the worst accident in Thanksgiving Day Parade history, high winds wagged Lupus’ tail off the planned street route and into a lamppost, toppling it onto the sidewalk below. Several injured parade goers were rushed to nearby Beth Israel Hospital, where one bystander spent the remainder of her holiday season in a medically-induced coma.) Come Christmas morning, children raced downstairs with hopes that Santa Claus had placed Doctor Lupus officially licensed merchandise under the tree. There were action figures, lunch boxes, board games, galore. (The Doctor Lupus Edition of Operation came with a trembling pair of forceps [batteries not included], to simulate alcohol withdrawals of the attending surgeon.)

In addition to buying children’s toys, people of all ages bought beer. More than ever. By the refrigerated truckload. Hildy and her Promethean gollum led Wolffenbeir to its best fiscal year in company history. Industry analysts credited the campaign with breathing new life into a brand that had grown stale. You heard that right … Without the triple bypass surgery performed by Doctor Lupus, Wolffenbeir was in serious danger of flat-lining — gone the way of Schwang Beer, and so many other once-thriving beverage concerns … fizzled out before their time.

Needless to say, Doctor Lupus sent shockwaves up and down Madison Avenue. Hildy graciously accepted the Addy Awards for Best Thirty-Second Spot, Best Creative Direction and Best Campaign. An unprecedented full-category sweep for Lupus, whose creative legacy would live on for generations to come. As written in a twentieth-anniversary tribute by AdMonth Magazine: It was his devil-may-care, irreverent sense of humor which helped to usher in a new wave of avant-garde branding.

What’s more, any ad man worth his Morton’s Salt Girl will tell you, it was Doctor Lupus who once and for all killed The Jingle. You see, it used to be that when a company wanted to promote themselves via the airwaves, they would trudge downtown to Tin Pan Alley and commission an aspiring music man to pen a tune. They called it a jingle. It set the tone for the product. Something you could mindlessly hum, all the way down to the department store. Above all else, Hildy had a vision for her tone. Long before it became Glacier Cold, Wolff Light would be Cool. Now at the time, Coolness, conceptually, was fairly new. But Hildy had the foresight to know that whatever Cool was, a jingle was not. So, in its place, over the Doctor Lupus animation played the opening verse of one of the first-ever commercially-licensed pop songs, a landmark achievement for the form. Ladies and Gentlemen, with their chart-topping hit, Good Lovin’, please give a warm welcome to, The Rascals:

I was feeling so bad

I asked my family doctor just what I had

I said, Doctor (Doctor)

Mr. M.D. (Doctor)

Now can you tell me what's ailing me? (Doctor)

He said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

(Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)

Yes, indeed, all I, I really need …

[Cartoon wolf devours cartoon raccoon]

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If there was one man immune to Doctor Lupus’ infectious charm, it was Wilhelm I, who detested marketing in all its forms. Advertising, sales, public relations, hexerei. You won’t find a prize inside your soap; there are no tricks, nor any treat; we are not snowmen or confidence artists, selling snake oil, as he would proselytize to Wilhelm II. We are not charlatans; we are craftsmen. We will not arrive to your door with sample goods in a bulging suitcase; that is nothing but a coffin to all who haul it. We make the door which you knock upon; the coffin in where you rest eternal. Call on our storefront, should that you wish to buy. These are our business hours. Here is our price. It is fair. Do you favor to purchase some other wares? By all means … Go right ahead, Sir. And a good day to you!

Thusly, the old man wearily watched Hildegard, his granddaughter ride her traveling circus on this meteoric ascent. Now there were rumours of her consideration for an officer-level position, on a fast track to the C-Suite. Von wegen! A woman would not—could not assume sovereignty of the Wolffenbeir Company, even if she was a Wolff by blood. Besides, Wilhelm I had named his chosen successor, Hildegard’s younger brother, Augustus, his grandson and last surviving male heir. Per his Opa’s orders, Gussie had gone back East to complete his degree in Biochemistry, and was returning home to begin a rotating apprenticeship throughout the brewery. Just as his own father had done, following the righteous path laid forth before him, if only to be thwarted by a coward’s bullet. While Gussie underwent his training, Wilhelm I stowed his sister away in what he considered to be a department of the utmost inconsequence: Marketing. And she should be happy at that! If he had his way, not she nor any woman would draw a wage from the Wolffenbeir Company. Why who would follow behind them on the employment line? Negroes? The Hispanics? Sodomists?

An aside about the Wolffensbeir Company’s hiring practices: In the decades that followed his son’s murder, Wilhelm I grew increasingly paranoid regarding the probability of the Homosexuals infiltrating the brewery on behalf of their staunch allies, the Communists. Or could it have been the reverse? Either way, Wilhelm I staffed a full-time polygraph technician in his Department of Human Resource Extraction (a precursor to HR) to conduct rigorous lie detector testing on all job applicants, to even the lowliest of hourly positions at the Wolffenbeir Company. Primarily, the Enhanced Interviews were designed to suss out any Perverse proclivities or Soviet sympathies. However Wilhelm I was also keen to know all prospective employees’ opinions of antique typewriters, German pistols, and Himself.

Regretably for Wilhelm I, Doctor Lupus was a force of nature even not he could control. (He had once bent the shape of a river.) Hildy rode that son of a bitch all the way to the now-coveted role of Chief Marketing Officer. Protracting that her career arc would soon crest atop the Wolffenbeir org chart, Wilhelm I personally endeavored to spay her further promotion in his capacity as Chairman of the Board. A savvy play. For here was a man who saw the whole chessboard. The first choice of any consequence he ever made was to stow himself away on that train compartment, on tracks laid due west. Starting there, at that railroad junction, he compiled an entire lifetime of making the right decision at exactly the right time. Until this very moment, when Wilhelm I made his first mistake — not including his three ex-wives, who were matrimonial sunk costs — and it was fatal. One by one, the board of directors betrayed him, Like Caesar, unanimously entering a vote of no confidence, removing him from his position, effectively excommunicating him from the institution he built and installing his granddaughter as the chairwoman-in-waiting. Six days later, just as soon as he could be sure the rest of his affairs were in order, Wilhelm I cemented their decision, splayed on the gravel of his eternally long, tax-shelter of a driveway.

And that is the rest of the story, about why Billy tried to lasso the moon. It was all for his mother. Ain’t that a bitch.

#novls of tumblr #soft water

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drinkprime · 1 year

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Hard Water Vs. Soft Water – What’s the Difference?

While it is common knowledge that water, the elixir of life, is an indispensable element in your daily life, you might not have given much thought to the type of water that may be available to you. In fact, the water that you may be using to bathe, brush your teeth and even drink may be vastly different from your friend who lives across the city. It is in recent times that the type of water available began to gain so much importance. The water available to you can be hard or soft depending upon its mineral load. Here is a low-down on hard water vs soft water, the benefits, and ill effects of each and how the type of water that you use can affect you.

What is hard water?

Water on its journey from its source to your tap, can accumulate a plethora of particles including minerals which causes hardness, particularly calcium and magnesium. Water with a high content of such minerals is commonly known as hard water. Hard water may also have a high concentration of other minerals and contaminants like manganese, iron and zinc.

Hard water leaves traces throughout your home and it’s easy to identify if the water available to you is hard or soft. This is because the mineral build up in the hard water causes unsightly lime scales.

Benefits of hard water

1. Hard water can provide the drinker with essential minerals like calcium and magnesium which are necessary for bone health.

2. If plants are watered with hard water, it can help prevent mineral deficiencies in them, leading to healthy plants.

3. The taste of beverages like coffee and tea has been known to improve when prepared with hard water.

4. Hard water is relatively more inexpensive to source, and it does not require any treatment, like soft water.

5. Hard water can also prevent elements like copper or lead from leaching into water used for drinking, from pipes.

Disadvantages of hard water

1. When you bathe with hard water, it can strip off the skin’s natural oils, alter its PH levels and may leave it vulnerable to infections. It can also leave mineral build up on the skin.

2. You may experience hair fall after washing with hard water and it may leave you with an itchy scalp. Skin conditions like eczema may aggravate when exposed to hard water frequently.

3. It may also damage appliances like dish water, washing machine, water heaters etc., leading to costly repairs frequently. The minerals in hard water can leave behind sediments that can clog the pipes and valves leading to damages. Water dependent machines in your homes may have a shorter life span, if exposed to hard water consistently.

4. Hard water which collects on faucets, shower heads or utensils washed with it, evaporates leaving behind sediment build up. This not only looks unsightly, but also makes you expend a lot of energy and time on its removal.

5. Though drinking hard water is considered relatively safe it may pose a problem for people prone to kidney stones as regular consumption is shown to cause a significant increase in urinary calcium concentration.

Related Reading: Impact of Hard Water on RO Water Purifiers and How to Prevent it.

What is soft water?

Water that has low concentration of minerals like calcium and magnesium is known as soft water. Naturally occurring soft water is usually formed in river basins created by rocks which are calcium deficient. Hard water can be converted into soft water using a water softener. Since the minerals have been removed from the water, soft water feels smooth to touch.

Benefits of soft water

1. With its low mineral concentration, soft water ensures that your soap and shampoo work effectively leaving behind lesser scums due to its low calcium deposits.

2. When hard water minerals are removed, your appliances are saved from these minerals which causes sediment buildup which reduces their life span. The soft water allows your appliances to work to their full potential, ensuring lower energy consumption.

3. Soft water also helps to combat skin dryness, especially in cold seasons where humidity is low.

4. Soft water is better in terms of odor and taste so you can enjoy pure safe drinking water that tastes sweet as well.

5. With soft water your clothes come out of the wash without any mineral stains on them.

Disadvantages of soft water

1. The high sodium content in salt water may be detrimental for people with sodium related issues or those on a low sodium diet.

2. Soft water when used with too much of soap or shampoo may create a slimy effect due to lack of minerals.

3. Food boiled in soft water may sometimes create a sour taste which is unpalatable.

4. Soft water does not provide minerals like calcium and magnesium which is beneficial to the body like hard water.

Difference between hard water and soft water

Hard water

Soft water

High mineral deposits Low concentration of mineralsCan cause mineral build up in appliances Does not cause mineral build upLeaves behind mineral deposits on crockery and faucets Does not leave behind mineral deposits Harder to lather soaps, leaves behind soap scums and makes laundry deer guts less effective Lathers easily and requires less soap and makes laundry detergents effectiveMay cause kidney stones but provides essential minerals High sodium levels may not suit people with sodium problem

Conclusion

Drinking hard or soft water may not affect your health in any major way. The difference between hard water and soft water is more obvious in the damage that hard water can cause to your appliances and the ugly stains it leaves behind on all surfaces, from your faucets and crockery to your clothes. It also causes skin conditions and hair fall. Your best bet is to invest in a water purification system that softens water while removing contaminants and pathogens, thus ensuring you get access to pure, safe water.

Source: Hard Water Vs. Soft Water – What’s the Difference?

#hard water vs soft water #hard water #soft water

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