ever & ever

Sparkling Water

ever & ever is a brand with exactly one trick up its sleeve: aluminum.

That’s right, ever & ever has staked their claim on the same thing that literally every sparkling water can has been made out of for decades.

To be fair, ever & ever is attempting to differentiate themselves not in the sparkling water aisle, but in the bottled water aisle, having assumed the mantle of ocean saviors, attempting to “disrupt” the tide of single-use plastic destroying the biosphere.

Although we do have to say we remain skeptical: there’s a million reusable aluminum, glass, and stainless steel water bottles out there.

Adding to the pile of single-use anything, even if it’s recyclable, seems like tilting at windmills to us. It’s reduce, reuse, and then and only then recycle, in that order.

But whatever, we’ll skip the lecture. Everyone needs some kind of Conscious Capitalism™️ bullshit to hang their shingle on these days, and at least it’s slightly better than tossing another Nestlé Whale Destroyer™️ into the waves.

And here in the sparkling water aisle, ever & ever’s entire marketing strategy goes out the window anyway, because you can recycle a can of Pure LaCroix or Waterloo Original just as easily, and without spending as much money.

So! Let’s look at what’s actually in this “ode to aluminum.”

Here’s ever & ever’s other hook: their water is reverse-osmosis filtered and topped off with electrolytes for taste.

Fun fact: reverse osmosis water, like distilled water, will actually start to leach minerals out of your body if you drink too much. So these electrolytes are pulling double-duty in here.

ever & ever claims this sparkling water has a pH of 7.4, which, another fun fact, is the same as human blood. This is a perfectly purified, remineralized, pH-balanced platonic ideal of water.

Tasting Notes

So given all that, we would expect this to taste like nothing except crisp, pure water.

Unfortunately, there’s a lingering bitterness, a faint sourness even. Maybe this comes from the carbonation? We’re not sure.  Some people online say it tastes like pennies.

It’s not an over-the-top aftertaste like in Waterloo’s Original, but it’s not the tastiest water around, either. If you want mineralized, carbonated water, we’ll highly recommend Rambler as an alternative to ever & ever. Or even the howling demons of Liquid Death.

And speaking of carbonation, we initially thought the screw-top on this aluminum “bottle-can” was clever.  Oh!, we thought, this will help keep the bubbles in while we’re drinking it.

Wrong!

It’s flat at about the halfway mark, despite us putting the cap on between sips. The flatness winds up highlighting the taste of the water, which again, isn’t offensive but also isn’t great.

The bubbles, when they did exist, were extra fizzy and sharp.  Which we enjoyed, but they kind of shot their load pretty quick.

Ultimately, ever & ever is mediocre, marketing-forward, and expensive. That’s about all we can say about this one.

Maybe we’re just cynical grumps, though, so let’s see what other people have to say!

Business Insider, confusingly, has a bullet point which says “We tasted it and were pleasantly surprised” but in their actual copy all they say is “In short, Ever & Ever’s still water doesn’t taste fantastic.”

Business Insider is really taken by the idea of aluminum, though.

Amazon reviews are decidedly mixed, but skew towards people who aren’t super pumped on the taste but still give high-ish ratings because they love the aluminum concept as much as Business Insider does.

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We shrug, because again, in case you missed it, aluminum has been around for a long time.

In fact, it’s such a popular material for beverage containers that there’s been a shortage for the last year.

Maybe we’re missing something, but building an entire brand strategy around the idea of putting mediocre liquid in aluminum is something that Bud Light may as well have a patent on.

But if this is where we’re at as a civilization, with the oceans ever and ever at the mercy of some wild-eyed CMO with an “aluminum!” PR blitz, we’ll take it, we guess.

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