Alkaline water has recently created huge waves in our local market with tells of it countless benefits and how it addressed underlying health conditions. The resounding songs of praise has resulted in a surge in price and the demand is putting tremendous pressure on its supply.
With such a high demand and an increase in the price of Alkaline water, a good percentage of its consumers are worried that the product could easily be adulterated as tap water could easily be used to refill the used container. The question it raises is, how can one tell if it's truly alkaline water?

Testing for alkalinity

It would be so easy to walk into a shop and ask for methyl-Orange or some litmus paper to be used as indicator in the test for alkalinity. First of all, I don't know which supermarket sales litmus paper around, if at all they do. And most consumers this days are very particular about what they eat as food. Others will not like the idea of testing their food with litmus paper. But is there a way to do the testing that is easy enough for any layman to attempt?

Testing for alkalinity at home
What you need here is a bulb of red cabbage as the main item. Seriously, it has to be red. Not the green or white type.
You can cut it into two halves and chop a half into small chunks.
Put the chopped red cabbage in a clean pot and boil it with water to extract the pigment.
Let it cool off and drain out the purple liquid which will serve as our indicator.

• if it comes in contact with an acid, it changes from purple to red
• if it should come in contact with real pure water it should maintain its colour
• if it should come in contact with a base then it turns blue

pH level

pH is a scale that moves from 1 to 14 with a neutral zone around 7 and 8. The highly acidic stuffs have the lower number while the strong base have higher numbers

Moving from 7 down to the smaller number will turn the indicator into a brighter red color as you go towards number one.
Moving from number seven up towards 14 will turn the indicator blue. Our alkaline water is located around 8 and 10 and will be having a change towards the Blue.
Picture Source

Conclusion

We can tell the real from from the Fake alkaline water without having to go to any laboratory. And with this, we are sure that what we are using for the test is not harmful in any way and our food can't get contaminated by it.