Boxed Water is a great idea that rises above or below its premise depending on the flavor

Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.

Bottled water always feels kind of silly to me. In part because I've lived where there's great tap water (Madison, Wisconsin, Warwick, Rhode Island... not Pittsburgh but you eventually come to enjoy the taste for some weird reason) and in part because it's wasteful. While you can effectively transmogrify aluminum over and over and glass can find new life, recycling plastic isn't nearly as efficient and in some cases doesn't happen at all.

Boxed Water aims to fix that problem. It's flavored water in Tetra-Pak style containers. That's a paper carton with aluminum and polyethylene (a plastic) that uses less plastic and requires less water to create. I've used it before for protein shakes, coconut water and smaller versions of boxed wine. It's a useful vessel, though it does seem to impart a bit of paper-y flavor to whatever it's holding.

Will that be a problem with water? Or can Boxed Water's flavors shine beyond their unique packaging?

Blackberry: B+

I'm excited. Blackberry is a great flavor and wildly underutilized in the cocktail world. This obviously isn't that, but the blackberry smell is intense right after you crack the carton. It's tart and sweet and smells a little like a mid-1990s bubble gum with some wild neon label.

The first impression is, well, just about everything you'd expect. Clean, purified water ringed with fruit flavor. The blackberry isn't especially rich, but it's apparent despite that lightness. A little sweet, a little tart, but ultimately a nice twist to make it a little easier to hydrate during the day.

That brings a minor candy feel to the proceedings, but you won't forget this is just plain, uncarbonated water. It's good.

Grapefruit: B+

Another interesting flavor. La Croix's grapefruit seltzer tastes so little like anything that it's set my expectations here at a nearly subterranean level. The smell off the top is much milder than the blackberry, but still pleasant and clean. There's no mistaking it's grapefruit.

The opening sip is gentle. The grapefruit is soft and subtle, which is where you'd want a fruit with pronounced tartness to land. There's a minor sweetness that makes it easy to drink against the absence of bubbles. It makes the whole affair feel a little thicker than it is, but it remains an easy sip.

The Tetrapak does leave a bit of a cardboard-y aftertaste if you're drinking right from the box. There's an easy solution there; pour it in a glass over ice. Grapefruit would never be the first flavor I pulled from the mix pack, but this holds up well. You'll never confuse it with a soda, seltzer or juice. That's fine. It works well enough on its own.

Cucumber: C

This should be a light lift for Boxed Water. Cucumber water is light, refreshing and basically a zero-calorie beverage on its own. It's slightly concerning we're getting "natural flavors" on the two-step ingredient list instead of "cucumber" but, fine.

The flavor is light off the top of the pour. The first sip is fairly minimal on cucumber. It comes off as sweet and, this is weird, a little more like artificial grape than the vegetable it's supposed to mimic.

Since there's so little flavor, you get a big dose of Tetrapak (Pure-Pak, in this case) packaging in each swig. That means a little plasticky/Tupperware feel that never quite goes away. It's not terrible, but it is noticeable. It sticks around whether you're sipping out of the box or poured over ice.

All said, it doesn't taste like you'd expect in a bad way.

Lemon: C

If you stick your nose up to the carton you get a clean, wet-nap citrus vibe. If you've poured it over ice you don't get much of anything. All signs point to a softer, more subtle water.

That mostly holds true, but it's difficult to shake the idea you're not drinking cleaning fluid. There's a real Mop-n-Glo, moist towelette feeling that comes with not-quite-fresh lemon. It persists in a glass or from the Pure-Pak, leaving everything to feel juuuuust a bit off.

The lemon isn't tart and crisp. It's sweet and sticky, leaving behind a lingering aftertaste that's halfway to a powdered lemon cookie. Well, no, that actually sounds kinda great. This is worse than that, like an abandoned project dismissed with a shrug.

That feels like it explains Boxed Water's worst flavors. Each is ultimately too light or too weird or both.

Would I drink it instead of a Hamm's?

This is a pass/fail mechanism where I compare whatever I’m drinking to my baseline cheap beer. That’s the standby from the land of sky-blue waters, Hamm’s. So the question to answer is: on a typical day, would I drink Boxed Water over a cold can of Hamm’s?

Boxed Water has already made it into a few tailgate coolers as a buffer beverage to keep me functional the next morning. It does its job. But it's water first and foremost, and there's only so much you can do to make it interesting.

Still, the packaging is a good thing.

This article originally appeared on For The Win: Boxed Water is a great idea that rises above or below its premise depending on the flavor