Most coconut water tastes roughly the same when you read the label. It does not taste the same when you actually drink it. So we went to find out where the difference lives.
For a week in the Mekong Delta we did almost nothing but open coconuts and taste them. Old ones, young ones, ones from different groves a few kilometres apart. Most were fine. A few were flat. And the young ones from around Bến Tre were the ones we kept reaching for, faintly sweet, clean, a little green.
It is not a glamorous job. You stand in the heat, you taste, you spit, you take notes, you do it again. But that week is the reason the can tastes the way it does.