Sparkling Water – The Great, the Bad, and the Simply Undrinkable

Somewhere in Seattle, about a decade ago, I picked up a can of LaCroix because everyone else seemed to be drinking it, and I have been quietly obsessed ever since.

That’s the whole origin story. Not a health kick, not a New Year’s resolution, just a cold can of fizzy water that tasted like something, and the slow realisation that I now cared — genuinely cared — about flavoured sparkling water. Which, as hobbies go, sounds like one of the more sensible ones. It is not. It has followed me across four countries and introduced me to drinks so good I’ve rationed them, and drinks so bad I’ve questioned whether the people who made them were born without tastebuds.

Before we go any further, let me be clear about what I mean, because the category is slippery and half the internet gets it wrong. I’m not talking about soft drinks. I’m not talking about a zero-sugar cola pretending to be a grown-up. And I’m not talking about plain sparkling water with a sad wedge of lemon balanced on the rim. I mean flavoured, water-based, little or no sugar, where the flavour is the whole point — but the drink still tastes like water, not liquid candy. That narrow band is the entire game. Stray too far in either direction and you’ve got either boredom or a soft drink, and I’m not interested in either.

Where it started: Seattle

It was while living in Seattle that the habit took hold, and it spoiled me rotten.

LaCroix was everywhere, and the thing I worked out quickly is that the obvious flavours aren’t where the brand earns its keep. Lemon and lime are fine, but the ones I kept reaching for were the less predictable ones. Tangerine is, to this day, one of my all-time favourites. Watermelon — which by rights should taste like a scented candle — is genuinely really good. When a brand can take a flavour that should be a disaster and make it work, that’s when you know someone in the building actually cares.

Which makes the one exception all the more spectacular. Coconut LaCroix tastes like sunscreen. Not “a bit like” sunscreen. It tastes the way the smell of a beach holiday gets trapped in a bottle of SPF 50, and then someone decided you should drink it. I have never finished a can. I admire the ambition and I will never forgive the result, and honestly, a brand I otherwise love producing one magnificent misfire is far more interesting than a brand that plays it safe and bores me.

Seattle had more than LaCroix, though. Safeway’s own-brand Soleil did a lemon that was genuinely really good — which is worth pausing on, because supermarket own-labels are usually where enthusiasm goes to die. And then there was Cascade Ice Blueberry, which was awesome, and which I could almost never find. Even in its home state, the thing I wanted most was the thing hardest to lay my hands on. I didn’t know it at the time, but that small, specific frustration was a taste of things to come.

Coming home: the great Australian drought

Then I came back to Australia, and the party stopped.

For a while there, flavoured sparkling water in this country was a wasteland. I searched high and low, and the shelves looked back at me blankly. Australia simply hadn’t caught up yet, and I spent an embarrassing amount of energy mourning a can of tangerine fizzy water I could no longer buy. This is a recurring theme, so get used to it: the drink you love lives in a different postcode to you, and frequently a different hemisphere.

Then Mount Franklin turned up with Lightly Sparkling Lime and Lightly Sparkling Lemon, and the drought broke. They’re good — properly good — and they scratched the itch I’d been nursing since the plane landed. What impressed me more is what happened next. The range expanded, and the new flavours held up. Raspberry is very good. Pineapple is very good. They kept adding flavours, and annoyingly for my earlier scepticism, they kept being good.

There’s a small irony here I can’t let pass. My big Australian win is a Coca-Cola product — the same global giant whose other fizzy offerings I spend a lot of time being rude about. Credit where it’s due, even when it’s slightly annoying to give.

Japan: a winner you can’t read

Japan was where the Geography Problem stopped being an inconvenience and became a genuine puzzle.

In Seattle and Australia, the barrier was availability. In Japan, the barrier was that I couldn’t read a single thing on the can. There’s no glancing at a shelf and recognising a brand, no quick scan for the flavour, no shortcuts at all — just rows of beautiful, confident packaging, every word of it in a language I don’t read, on convenience store shelves and vending machines alike, all equally happy to take my money. So I did the only thing you can do: I bought things more or less at random and found out what I’d committed to afterwards.

There were misses. Of course there were misses. But then I landed on Wilkinson Tansan Lemon — the 580ml bottle, picked up from a FamilyMart — and it was a winner. Crisp, properly carbonated, the lemon actually tasting like lemon. After a run of mystery purchases, finding the one felt like a small victory earned the hard way.

Here’s the detail I love, which I only learned afterwards. Wilkinson is named after an Englishman, John Clifford Wilkinson, who came across naturally carbonated mineral water in the hills near Takarazuka in the late 1880s. Which means the reason I was standing in a Japanese konbini well over a century later, happily drinking lemon fizzy water, traces back to a British dude stumbling on a bubbling spring. The world is a ridiculous and wonderful place and you can’t tell me otherwise.

Japan then did it twice. Seven-Eleven’s own-brand 7 Premium Strong Carbonated Water Lemon was the other find — mineral water, carbonation, flavouring, no sugar, no calories, sitting right in the sweet spot. “Strong carbonation” is stated proudly on the label, and they mean it. That’s two winners from Japan, both of them technically supermarket own-brands, which brings me neatly to a bone I need to pick.

Canada: more choice, less joy

If Japan’s problem was too little information, Canada’s was too much of everything else.

Canadian supermarkets in 2026 are drowning in sparkling water. Whole shelves heaving with it. Colourful cans, cheerful fonts, photographs of fruit so vivid you can practically taste them. And I want to be honest about what all that abundance delivered, because it’s the heart of this whole piece: not much. The labels were in English, the choice was enormous, the fruit on the packaging looked fantastic, and finding something I actually enjoyed was still a slog. Choice is not the same as quality. The pictures of fruit were doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting that the liquid inside had no intention of backing up.

The low point was a President’s Choice lime that tasted like industrial toilet cleaner. I don’t say that for effect. It was so far removed from anything resembling the small green fruit on the bottle that it crossed over from disappointing into genuinely comical. Somewhere there is a flavour lab where someone signed off on that, and I would dearly love to know what they were thinking.

The same brand also did a black cherry, and this one stung more, because I like cherry. I wanted it to be good. It was distinctly, aggressively artificial, and I couldn’t finish it. There’s a particular kind of letdown reserved for the drinks you were rooting for.

And then there’s Bubly, PepsiCo’s entry in the category, which I gave every possible chance. I tried flavour after flavour, genuinely hoping one of them would redeem the rest. None did. I would, with complete sincerity, rather drink a can of paint stripper. A single bad flavour I can forgive — every brand has one. A whole range I deliberately worked through, still coming up empty, is a different and more impressive kind of failure.

But Canada isn’t a write-off, and this is the important part, because it would be easy to declare an entire country’s sparkling water rubbish. After wading through the misses, I found Montellier Lemon — light, refreshing, properly enjoyable. As it turns out, it’s a spring water from a family-run Quebec company founded in 1984, and lemon was the very first flavour they ever made, back in 1993. Which rather fits: the genuine local article, built around the exact flavour I use to judge everything else, quietly outclassing the big-name noise around it. Persistence paid off, the same way it had in Japan. Every country in this story eventually handed me a winner, as long as I was stubborn enough to keep looking.

What I’ve actually learned

Somewhere across all this, a quiet little measuring stick emerged, and I didn’t even notice I was using it until recently.

Lemon is my benchmark. It’s almost always the first flavour I try in any new brand, which makes it the one fair comparison I can run across every country and every shelf. It’s simple, it’s familiar, and everyone knows roughly what lemon is meant to taste like. That makes it an excellent test: when a brand can’t manage a passable lemon or lime, I’m not particularly keen to give it another chance. The real credit, the “above and beyond” mark, goes to the brands that clear the citrus bar comfortably and then pull off something ambitious — a tangerine, a watermelon, a blueberry — and still make it taste like the fruit rather than a chemistry set.

Which raises a fair question: if lemon or lime is what I’m after, why not just squeeze some into plain sparkling water? Well, I do that too, particularly with fresh lime. But that’s a different drink, and sometimes I want something different. There’s a particular pleasure in a cold, lightly flavoured sparkling water where the flavour is already part of the drink, without the sharpness of fresh citrus or the faff of squeezing fruit. I’m not looking for one to replace the other. I just happen to like both, and when I’m buying flavoured sparkling water, I want the flavour to get the balance right.

Which brings me to the thing I keep snagging on. “Lemon” on a can is a promise about taste. But the flavour might come from aroma compounds extracted, isolated or built up in ways that have very little to do with the experience of actually squeezing a lemon. And this is where a lot of people reach for “natural versus artificial,” which I think is the wrong fight. “Derived from a natural source” and “tastes like the real fruit” are two completely different questions. A flavour can be entirely natural in origin and still taste nothing like the thing on the label — and Bubly is the perfect example. Its cans make a point of having no artificial sweeteners, and the ingredients list is just carbonated water and natural flavour. Nothing about that stopped it being undrinkable to me. “Natural” tells you where a flavour came from. It tells you precisely nothing about whether it’s any good. The gap I care about isn’t on the ingredients list. It’s the distance between the fruit I was promised and the liquid in the glass.

I could keep going. I could start logging carbonation pressures and aftertaste notes and turn this into a spreadsheet, and that’s roughly the point where the hobby stops being fun and starts being a second job. So I won’t. What I actually want from a flavoured sparkling water hasn’t changed since that first can in Seattle: something cold that tastes like something, stays on the right side of the line between water and soda, and doesn’t taste like sunscreen, toilet cleaner, or paint stripper.

It’s a low bar. You’d be amazed how many drinks limbo straight under it.