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Pairing Mineral Water With Food

This blog post contains more information from Michael Mascha's book Fine Waters and website FineWaters.com. Previously I looked at How to Classify Bottled Waters and How to Properly Serve Bottle Water. Today we'll look at pairing water with food. You can read the full description of it on the FineWaters website.

Basically, Mascha says you match the food or you contrast it, much like any other pairing. However, you're largely not pairing with flavor, you're pairing with texture.

Mascha says 75 percent of the pairing importance should be about the mouthfeel of the water, as measured by the carbonation. Big loud boldly carbonated waters can overwhelm subtle dishes, but would go well with crispy food, for example. He pairs the level of carbonation with the overall mouthfeel of the entire dish.

The next 20 percent pairing is matching the dominant food in the dish (rather than the overall dish) with the water's mineral content. Highly mineralic water has weight to it, and can be paired with big flavors like grilled beef, lamb, and hard cheeses.

The final 5 percent of pairing is fine-tuning the experience with the water's pH level. Waters that are slightly alkaline (basic) can be perceived as sweet, and highly alkaline water can taste slightly bitter. Acidic waters go with fatty food or seafood.

Those rules are for matching the water with the food. However, if you're serving wine at the meal, Mascha says you need to match the water to the wine instead. He says match white wine with still water that has a low mineral content and neutral pH, while red wine can be paired with still water with medium to high mineral content, but still a neutral pH.

In the book, Mascha has a chart of pairings. With grilled beef, use a water with "classic" (normal) carbonation, high minerality, and an alkaline (basic) pH. These are all the 'big' flavors of water. With lobster, he recommends still water with super low amount of dissolved solids, and a neutral pH. These are all the most subtle lack-of-flavors in water.

Finally, you can treat water like you might think of wine and cocktails throughout courses. For appetizers, he recommends starting with a boldly carbonated water, much like champagne. As you move to salad, move to water with the lowest carbonation level. He then recommends switching to still water for a contrast with a light first course, a lightly carbonated water with a second course, then pairing the main course by texture as outlined above. With dessert he recommends still water or very lightly carbonated, but you can work with the pH in that alkaline waters can be perceived as sweet or slightly bitter, making them the dessert or the digestif.

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The Water Project on Alcademics is research into water in spirits and in cocktails, from the streams that feed distilleries to the soda water that dilutes your highball. For all posts in the project, visit the project index page.

Related articles

How to Classify Bottled Waters

How to Properly Serve Bottled Water

Tasting the Regional Waters of Scotland

Measuring the pH of Mineral Waters

June 7, 2013
How to Properly Serve Bottled Water

The book Fine Waters and the accompanying website have been real eye-openers for me. In another post I wrote about how the author Michael Mascha categorizes bottled waters. In this post I'll talk about how he recommends serving bottled waters. And in another post I'll share his advice on pairing water with food and wine.

Ice

Mascha would prefer that you didn't. He says, "Ice is the natural enemy of bottled water." He prefers serving water at the proper temperature (see below) and avoiding ice altogether. But if you must, make ice cubes with the same water you're serving.

For cocktails, he recommends high-end water with a neutral pH (around 7.0) and low amount of dissolved solids (TDS).

Stemware

"Toasting with a water goblet just looks silly," says Mascha, bemoaning that water glasses as part of stemware sets are shorter and made with heavy glass.

He notes that some manufacturers like Riedel have come out with stemware designed for water that are tall and thin. I'll have to track some down.

Storage

Mascha stores his water in a wine cellar at 55 degrees, which is also about his serving temperature (see below). The International Bottled Water Association recommends storing bottles away from sunlight, at lower than room temperature, and not near strong chemicals like paint thinner. (I suppose that would also prevent accidentally drinking from the wrong bottle. )

Decanting

Recommended for still water in ugly plastic bottles, but otherwise unnecessary.

Serving Temperature

It sounds like 55 degrees Fahrenheit is Mascha's default temperature, especially when comparing brands to each other.

Below is a chart of his ideal temperature for serving bottles of different effervescence, from least to most.

Carbonation Level Temperature

Still 54F (12C)

Effervescent 56F (13C)

Light 58F (14C)

Classic 60F (16C)

Bold 62F (17C)

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The Water Project on Alcademics is research into water in spirits and in cocktails, from the streams that feed distilleries to the soda water that dilutes your highball. For all posts in the project, visit the project index page.

Related articles

How to Classify Bottled Waters

Tasting the Regional Waters of Scotland

More Mineral Water Info from a Book on Soda

Building Better Mineral Water: Deconstructing Mineral Waters

June 6, 2013
Water Research Resources

Below are some of the sources I've been using in the Water Project here on Alcademics. I'll update this page as I use more resources and read more books.

Fix the Pumps. This book by Darcy O'Neil about vintage soda fountains also has information about mineral waters, which were once made-to-order. It includes practical information about how to keg soda waters, and list some not-so-practical recipes for commercial soda waters (as they're 20 liter+ batches), but there is good information about how to properly get minerals into solution with carbonation.

Khymos. This blog has an amazing resource – a list of all the minerals in various commercial bottled waters, plus a spreadsheet that helps calculate how to make versions of them at home by adding your own mineral salts and carbonating. The two relevant pages are the original DIY Mineral Water post and then an updated page Mineral Waters A La Carte.

Craft Cocktails at Home. This book, which is more sciency than it sounds, contains an interesting chapter on water. I published that chapter on Alcademics here, but the whole book is worth buying.

Fine Waters by Michael Mascha. This is the book on bottled water, written by a water sommelier. Not on the history or environmental consequences of it – there are plenty of those- but on categorization of bottled waters by carbonation, dissolved solid content, and pH. Plus there is great information on pairing water with food and wine. Most of the information from the book is also available on his website FineWaters.com.

MineralWaters.org. This site, which looks a bit out of date, lists information about water, drinking statistics, and water analyses. It also allows you do do things like sort brands of water by factors like pH and mineral content.

What to Drink with What you Eat by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page. On pages 276-277, they include what to pair with waters of different carbonation levels (based on the Fine Waters scale). For example, Boldly carbonated bottled water such as Perrier and Saratoga Springs pairs with: crispy appetizers, chips, fried food, hamburgers, especially with cheese, hor d'oeuvres, nuts, fried oysters, and pizza.

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The Water Project on Alcademics is research into water in spirits and in cocktails, from the streams that feed distilleries to the soda water that dilutes your highball. For all posts in the project, visit the project index page.

Related articles

Tasting the Regional Waters of Scotland

Building Better Mineral Water: Deconstructing Mineral Waters

Measuring the pH of Mineral Waters

More Mineral Water Info from a Book on Soda

June 5, 2013
How to Classify Bottled Waters
Most books about bottled water seem to trace the history and environmental impact of the industry, but Fine Waters by Michael Mascha is quite a different book from that.

Mascha is a water sommelier and runs the website FineWaters.com, which contains pretty much all of the information in the book as far as I can see. (The book from 2006 is out of print but still available on Amazon and other sites.)

In the book Mascha lays out a categorization scheme for bottled waters, which I'll briefly repeat below.

Bottled Water versus Bottled Water

Mascha is not concerned with municipal waters put into a bottle (the to-go part of it- the bottle- being the emphasis), but on bottled natural waters, in which the water is the important part.

Source of Water
- Spring – This is a tricky term because in the US, spring water doesn't have to come from a spring, but can come from a well drilled next to a spring if the two water sources are linked somewhere underground.
- Artesian – I thought this was another word for 'artisinal' but I was wrong. Artesian aquifers are basically trapped water under pressure, which will pump itself to the surface if a hole is drilled. Fiji and Voss are artesian waters.
- Well – Similar to spring water, but comes from a well.
- Rain – rain.
- Glacier – Very old water with low mineral content tasting similar to rain water.
- Iceberg – Not as pristine as you might imagine, with microorganisms found in old ice and some layers from the 1950s when the air was impure and atomic tests were common.
- Lake, stream, reservoir – typically purified before bottling.
- Deep sea – melted iceberg water now on the sea floor, pumped up in Hawaii from a 3,000 foot pipe into the ocean. Cool!
Carbonation Level

Mascha says that the carbonation level controls the mouthfeel of water, and is the most important factor in matching water with food. He developed a scale that he calls the FineWaters Balance:
- Still – No carbonation
- Effervescent – nearly still with some bubbles. Badoit is an example.
- Light
- Classic – Typical carbonation level we expect from a bottled water
- Bold – Big bubbles with big pops, like in Perrier.
Total Dissolved Solids (TDS)

This is the amount of dissolved minerals in the water. Interestingly, this is different from Water Hardness, which only considers the calcium and magnesium levels of a water. So a water can be hard water (lots of calcium and/or magnesium) but have a low TDS level overall.

pH Level

Acidic water can taste sour. Alkaline (basic) water can taste bitter and have a slippery feel. Slightly basic waters may taste sweet. Mascha says this only account for 5 percent of the overall flavor of bottled water though.

In future posts, I'll cover other topics from the book, which I found completely fascinating.

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The Water Project on Alcademics is research into water in spirits and in cocktails, from the streams that feed distilleries to the soda water that dilutes your highball. For all posts in the project, visit the project index page.

Related articles

Tasting the Regional Waters of Scotland

Building Better Mineral Water: Deconstructing Mineral Waters
June 4, 2013
More Mineral Water Info from a Book on Soda
Another useful resource in my exploration of water in spirits and cocktails is Darcy O'Neil's book Fix the Pumps.

The book focusses on the history and mechanics of the pre-Prohibition soda fountain. Though largely filled with information on sodas, it includes a chapter and some recipes on mineral waters.

Before global shipping became easy, soda fountains made their own soda and mineral waters, with the carbonation being the main attraction.

Here are a few things I learned from the book:
- Club Soda is a trademarked brand. Seltzer water was a brand but is now generic.
- Carbonation's sensation on the tongue is a chemical sensation rather than a mechanical one. O'Neil likens it to eating peppers, which release endorphins in response to the mild noxious action on the tongue, so the end result is a pleasurable experience.
- Bubble formation in carbonated water is affected by CO2 pressure (more pressure gives larger bubbles), temperature (colder allows more CO2 to go into solution), and nucleation points (stuff in the water and imperfections in the serving glass).
- Common minerals found in mineral waters are calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium. But most minerals waters have a relatively low sodium chloride (table salt) level, compared with sodium carbonate/bicarbonate (baking soda).
- One should add mineral salts to plain water then carbonate it, as they don't dissolve well in already-carbonated water.
- Sometimes it is hard to get all the salts to dissolve. O'Neil provides a chart of the order in which they should be added for best dissolution.
There are also recipes for 12 soda waters in the book, which are useful as comparisons more than recipes as they're scaled for batches of 19 to 50 liters.

There's a lot more in the book (and you really should buy it for the soda stuff- it's fascinating) but those were a few take-aways for my experiments.

Now it's back to the lab for me…

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The Water Project on Alcademics is research into water in spirits and in cocktails, from the streams that feed distilleries to the soda water that dilutes your highball. For all posts in the project, visit the project index page.
May 30, 2013
Paloma Recipe Round-Up: 20+ Paloma Variations

In my research on the Paloma I have come across many variations on the drink, so I thought I'd link to them here.

Typically the Paloma is made with tequila (always use 100% agave!), grapefruit soda such as Squirt or Jarritos, a squeeze of a lime wedge and a pinch of salt. Esquire's standard recipe is here. A version using fresh grapefruit and soda water is here.

Here are some Paloma variations from around the internet.

Blood Orange and Thyme Paloma by Airda Molenkamp [recipe]

Nuestra Paloma by Thad Vogler of Beretta, SF. It contains St. Germain, bitters, Cointreau, and grapefruit juice. [recipe]

The Charred Grapefruit Paloma by Warren Bobrow [recipe]

Paloma, Mi Amante by Paul Clarke – A Paloma using strawberry-infused tequila. [recipe]

Paloma Variation – A Paloma using IPA beer, plus tequila, grapefruit cordial, and lime. [mentioned here; no recipe]

Palomita – A Paloma without tequila; just using Coinreau, lime, and grapefruit. [recipe]

Green Palomarita – Mezcal, lime, grapefruit, Chartreuse [recipe]

Dove & Daisy – Tequila, lime, Aperol, orange liqueur, salt, soda water. [recipe]

La Paloma – Grapefruit liqueur, tequila, grapefruit juice, lime, soda. [recipe]

Cantarito – A Paloma variation using lemon, lime, and orange juices in place of the lime squeeze. [recipe]

Paloma Brava by Dushan Zaric – Contains tequila, lime, orange, grapefruit, grapefruit soda, agave nectar, and salt. [recipe]

La Canterita by Ashley Miller – Tequila, triple sec, agave nectar, grapefruit, lemon, lime, orange. [recipe]

Strawberry Paloma with strawberry-infused tequila, honey, lime, and grapefruit. [recipe]

Reunion Cooler by Jennifer Colliau- Tequila, peppercorns, pineapple, grapefruit peel, lime. [recipe]

The 212 by Aisha Sharpe and Willy Shine – Tequila, Aperol, grapefruit [recipe]

Siesta by Katie Stipe – Tequila, Campari, lime, grapefruit, simple syrup [recipe]

Acapulco by Salvatore Calabrese – Tequila, rum, grapefruit, pineapple. [recipe]

Cardarita by Ago Perrone – Tequila, almond-cardamom sugar, grapefruit, Galliano, ginger ale [recipe]

Salty Chihuahua – Tequila, grapefruit juice, salt [recipe]

Ginger Paloma – Ginger-grapefruit syrup, tequila, lime, club soda [recipe]

Tequila Fresa Punch – Starwberry-infused tequila, triple sec, orange, lime, grapefruit soda, orange bitters [recipe]

Related articles

Cocktail Recipe: The Brown Trout by Dave Newman

May 20, 2013
Perfectly Clear Ice Balls – A Clever Trick

One of Alcademics' readers figured out a simple way to make perfectly clear ice balls by using a silicon ice ball mold, a piece of wire, and a pot of water.

His name is Craig Belon and so he calls it the Belon Method. No actual parrots are required.

[update: Check out easier ways to make clear ice balls at the Index of Ice Experiments]

Artwork by Craig Belon, as are all photos in this post except the next one.

The method is this:

1. Get yourself a silicone ice ball tray like this one that comes in a pack of six.

2. Over a pot of water (or better yet, a cooler as that will produce lots of clear ice) make a wire loop that the ice ball mold will sit on.

3. Fill the pot with water just up to the wire. Also fill ice ball with water. Feel free to fill the ice ball with distilled or filtered water for better taste.

Dunk the filled ice ball mold into the pot of water with the hole FACING DOWN. As you pull the mold up out of the water to set it on the wire. The water should stay inside the ice mold rather than running down into the pot. That's the whole trick.

4. Freeze it.

As I figured out during all the ice experiments, the water freezes directionally from the coldest place to the warmest; and the first parts to freeze are perfectly clear whereas the last area to freeze is cloudy from trapped air, impurities, and pressure cracks.

In a typical ice cube, that's outside-in, with the cloudy part in the center. In the Cooler Method I force that to be top-down. Using this pot the water will freeze from the outside-in, but the big pot creates a big heat sink so the top will be clear until after the ice ball is fully frozen.

So with the hole in the ice ball mold facing the bottom of the pot, as the water in the mold turns to ice and expands, it pushes out the extra air-filled water out the hole into the pot below.

5. Let it freeze, then remove it.

Now that's a sexy ice ball! Thanks for sharing Craig!

For those of you who want to freeze more than one ball at a time, I'm guessing you could simply make multiple loops in the wire to hold multiple ice balls, but suspend it over a cooler (as in the Cooler Method) instead, as that is all freezing from the top-down. And at the end, you'd have a bunch of ice balls plus a slab of clear ice with which to make cubes.

Belon also included a way he likes to drink absinthe using an ice ball.

"Flawless Absinthe" by Craig Belon

Recipe:

1 Ice ball using the Belon Method
1 Absinthe glass (essential due to its shape)
1 Sugar cube
Chilled water

Directions:

-place just enough absinthe into an absinthe glass to fill the bottom bulb part

-Insert Belon Method ice ball, corking off the absinthe in the bottom

-SLOWLY add water to the top over a sugar cube in the standard absinthe preparation fashion.

Physics: the water is denser than the liquor anyway, but with sugar dissolved especially more so. This water will flow around the miniscule gap between the ice ball and the edge of the glass, further cooling it. It will slip past the ball to the bottom of the glass, forming an absinthe-sugarwater interface in the bulb that slowly rises, producing the characteristic white precipitate…. but only at the interface! The fluids of differing densities will remain mostly unmixed over the course of 5-10 minutes, with a rising line of precipitate, until most of the absinthe is on the TOP of the glass, freezing, (it started at the bottom) and still crystal clear, and the sugar water at the bottom. This process produces a beautiful cascading effect (properly: Schlering lines)

What this means is that the drink actually starts as a pretty stout swig of pure absinthe that is frigid-cold, and as you drink it changes to become sweeter and sweeter.

A cocktail that changes as you drink it, each sip different than the last. Thanks to physics.

—

Well then, thanks to physics, and thanks again to Craig Belon for his brilliant little trick.

An index of all of the ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.

May 15, 2013

Building Better Mineral Water: Deconstructing Mineral Waters

In the Water Project here on Alcademics, I'm looking at what is in commercial brands of sparkling mineral waters and reconstructing them.

To do so, first I looked at how to get all the dissolved solids out of tap water. Then I measured properties of commercial mineral waters – pH and dissolved solids- and compared them with publicly available information.

The next step was to examine what each mineral in mineral water tasted like on its own.

Again referring to the information on Khymos.org, I could see that the primary minerals in mineral water are Calcium, Sodium, Magnesium, and Potassium. The website also allows you to look at bicarbonate, sulfate, chloride, and nitrate.

To taste each of these minerals/salts on its own, I looked up the mineral water with the greatest concentration of a particular mineral, then added the ingredient in the proper amount to mineral-free water to give me that water's amount of it. In other words, if Apolinaris water had the most Magnesium (it did), then I started with water with no minerals in it and added the magnesium-containing ingredients in its recipe (epsom salts and magnesium carbonate) without worrying about the other minerals in the recipe.

I measured the pH and total dissolved solids (TDS) of the new mineral water before carbonation, and the pH again afterward. This was mostly to make sure I wasn't adding anything that would put the mineral water outside of a safe range of pH for drinking.

Single-Mineral Mineral Water Chart

Mineral	Brand	Added	pH	TDS	pH after carbonation	Notes
Calcium	Contrex	Plaster of Paris	9.9	244	4.8	Cleared up after carbonation. Nice fizz. Taste: powdery/dry but not flavorful
Magnesium	Apolinaris	Epsom salts and Magnesium Carbonate	10	132	5.1	Cloudy until carbonate, creamy, mineraly, soft carbonation though
Sodium	Saint-Yorre	Baking soda and Table salt	8.2	2170	5.9	Clear before carbonation, great fizz, tastes very salty
Potassium	Saint-Yorre	Potassium Bicarbonate	8.4	158	4.8	Clear before carbonating, fizzes over with carbonation when charging, flavor is dryness; not much else
Sufate	Contrex	Epsom salt and Plaster of Paris	7.4	459	5.1	A little sweet. Really good carbonation. Nice texture.
Chloride	San Narciso	table salt	6.9	876	6.9	Good carbonation but just salty, blech

It was interesting to see how these salts affected carbonation; not just flavor of the water.

The next step was to taste these one-mineral-rich waters with alcohol to see what happened. I thought they might bring out different aspects of flavor in booze and I was right.

I made an equal-parts Vodka Soda with each of the soda waters above. My tasting notes were:

Mineral	Notes
Calcium	Bright and flavorful
Magnesium	Not a lot of character; a little salty
Sodium	Salty, way too salty
Potassium	Chalky but kinda good
Sulfate	Brighter and sweeter, but perhaps too much so
Chloride	Salty

After this, I made a mineral blend of what I thought might work, using a combination of baking soda, epsom salt, and plaster of paris. This blend did make the flavor in vodka (and whisky) pop, but was too salty tasting.

My next experiments will be to build other mineral blends to find one(s) that I like. There is much more work to be done!

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The Water Project on Alcademics is research into water in spirits and in cocktails, from the streams that feed distilleries to the soda water that dilutes your highball. For all posts in the project, visit the project index page.

May 13, 2013

Top Bourbon Historical Myths on Details Daily Blog

My latest story is up on Details.com. I took a look at Michael Veach's amazing book Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey: An American Heritage and wrote about a few of the many bourbon myths he busted.

These include who invented bourbon, why it's called that, what they used to put into it to make it taste older, and more.

Go read the story on Details.com.

April 30, 2013
Tasting the Regional Waters of Scotland

In my search for information about water sources used for various spirits as part of the Water Project, I came across Uisge Source, a company that bottles waters from different regions in Scotland.

The waters from Speyside, Islay, and the Highlands are meant to be representative of the waters used by distillers in those regions to make scotch; for dilution of drinks in the bourbon-and-branch style.

As I learned in the book Whisky on the Rocks, even distilleries next to each other may have different water sources, so it shouldn't be assumed that all the distilleries in an area use waters just like these in their whisky, but it seems like a good place to start.

The really cool thing about Uisge Source that it's not just water they sourced from these regions; they actually tell you about the chemistry of the water.

Islay’s Ardilistry Spring produces water with higher natural acidity which is created by filtration through peat.

St Colman’s Well in the Highland region produces a hard water, high in minerals due to filtration through porous and brittle red sandstone and limestone.

The Cairngorms Well in the Speyside region produces a soft water, low in minerals as a result of being filtered through hard rock such as granite.

And they give a chart of each water's properties. I love charts! (Click to make it bigger.)

As you can see from the chart, the Highland water is full of minerals including calcium and magnesium. Islay water is high in potassium, chloride, and sodium, and has a lower (more acidic) pH. Speyside water is low in nearly all minerals and has a slightly higher (more basic) pH than the other waters.

So: How do they taste? Happily, they sent me some to experiment with.

Uisge Source Taste Test

Speyside: Tastes quite dry. I notice this in distilled waters without mineral content, though at 125 ppm dissolved solids this still has a lot more minerals in it than my tap water. There is a granite taste to the water as well – not a creamy soft minerality but a hard one.

Highland: I measured the total dissolved solids (TDS) in this one at 225 ppm. It tastes softer in body and sweeter than Speyside. It's also more earthy.

Islay: At 183 ppm TDS it is halfway in mineral content between the other two, but this water has the most flavor- it's got a pronounced dirt/earthiness to it but I also taste grainy minerality.

Then the natural test would be to try different whiskies with the different waters, so that's what I did. The results were surprising!

Tasting Uisge Source with Scotch

I tried a 25-year-old Highland single-malt with each water, and a 10 year-old cask-strength Islay with each. I was surprised to find that each whisky tasted best with its regional water! Maybe I just got lucky – I didn't measure quantities down to drops and such, but I really didn't expect these to align.

The Speyside water made both the Islay and Highland whisky taste sweet. The Highland water brought out honey notes from whiskies, but it was totally in synch with the flavor profile of the Highland scotch where it wasn't a perfect fit for the Islay. The Islay water brought out the creme brulee and smoke of the Highland scotch which was good but not the typical flavor profile I associate with it, while it did the same for the Islay scotch to great effect.

This could all be in my head (and down my throat at this point) but I was surprised at how much these waters with subtle differences brought out pronounced differences in the whisky. Awesome.

Looking to buy Uisge Source? Unfortunately it's not in the US yet, though they tell me they're in talks with an importer and I'll share the news when it's available. They have a list of retailers on the site for UK customers and you may find it in duty-free shops in some airports.

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The Water Project on Alcademics is research into water in spirits and in cocktails, from the streams that feed distilleries to the soda water that dilutes your highball. For all posts in the project, visit the project index page.

Related articles

Announcing the Water Project on Alcademics

The Geology of Scotland and the book Scotch on the Rocks

Making Mineral Water: Starting from Scratch

April 25, 2013

Carbonation Level	Temperature
Still	54F (12C)
Effervescent	56F (13C)
Light	58F (14C)
Classic	60F (16C)
Bold	62F (17C)