Water That’s Less Boring

Chocolate seems like a stupid thing to add to water, which is already basically the perfect beverage. Adding mint on top of that seems like compounding the error. Yet even though Metromint’s Chocolatemint flavored water does exactly that, the result is startlingly tasty.

The healthy beverage has three ingredients: purified water, mint, and cocoa essence. Sidestepping the whole “bottled water is Satan” thing for a moment, that’s a pretty clean and simple way to doctor up one’s water. The mint lingers but isn’t aggressive or insistent, and the cocoa essence hovers almost beyond perception: It’s as though a light dusting of cocoa powder settled in the bottle just as it was being sealed. There’s no artificial sweetness (nor any sweeteners at all), no calories, and no hint of syrup or thickness.

The bottle claims a “chill factor” of “-2° (quietly cool),” part of a marketing gimmick wherein each one of Metromint’s flavored drinks claims a different peg on the Metromint cool-o-meter (or whatever it’s called). And it might be marketing working on me, but the drink does somehow taste colder than refrigerated water.

Laughable on the surface but deftly executed, Chocolatemint is a minor triumph of beverage engineering. It’s a drink worth exploring if you’re the type of person who’s bored by plain water but balks at consuming extra calories or questionable chemicals.

James Norton edits the Upper Midwestern food journal Heavy Table. He's also the coauthor of a book on Wisconsin's master cheesemakers. For his Supertaster Daily videos, he samples offerings from supermarket aisles and fast-food menus. You can follow him on Twitter, fan him on Facebook, and subscribe to his YouTube channel.