Why I Drink Metromint® Chocolatemint Water

It's not so much because it's "quietly cool" with a "chill factor" of exactly minus two degrees. Even less because it's "a real chocolate and mint experience without the guilt of sweeteners." And not at all because it "relieves [my] thirst, soothes [my] body and revives [my soul]. No, I drink Metromint® Chocolatemint Water because of the bottle. It's the bottle I like. "Pure. Simple."

The Metromint® bottle and the experience it offers are outrageously expensive, about $1.69 for 500 milliliters. I know I'm not the only person who drinks this water – after all, there's a whole display of it at the store. But I'm the only person – or at least I hope I am — who drinks out of this bottle. To me, the bottle is a little bit of health insurance. The premium I pay is worth it from an infection control standpoint.

The Metromint® bottle is different from other water bottles. It's tall, straight up and down, and thin. It has a silver label with brown dots (in the case of Chocolatemint) in vertical rows across the left two-thirds. I'm looking at my bottle right now and I see that it's getting pretty beat up. But I won't be buying a new one anytime soon. I buy one bottle at a time and refill it with water from the reverse osmosis system at my kitchen sink. I keep refilling it until my dog gets hold of it or I manage to break it or lose it.

It's not that I'm so attached to the Metromint® bottle. It's just that I'm sick of other complete strangers – frequently drunk strangers — drinking out of my bottle when I set it down at dances, concerts, or the gym. Somehow, even drunk strangers recognize that they're looking at the wrong water bottle when they look at mine. If they go so far as to touch it, they seem to recognize that they've got the wrong bottle because of the unusual shape.

Metromint® water comes in other flavors, with green, blue, orange and yellow dots on the labels. But I have found that the brown dots on the Chocolatemint label are the only ones that reliably ward off theft and contamination.