Beer is pretty funny that way. The most fancy, expensive and artisanal beard guy stuff is often impossible to distinguish in a blind test, it's just sharp tasting hop juice.
Atleast with beer you can actually get different tastes.
The tests with water are funny, when knowing the name or price people pick the most expensive one as the best tasting, when it turns out that all the bottles were filled with tap water.
Maybe it's also different levels of carbonation, there are definitely at least 2 brands of locally available water that I can pick out. One just tastes a little bit off (and is REALLY carbonated) and the other one is so salty you can only stomach it when you're used to it. My parents used to buy the brand and only after not drinking it for a few years I was unpleasantly surprised...
But in general, yeah - uncarbonated ones I've never ever tasted any difference to local tap water.
Dasani's uniquely terrible. IDK what they do to it, but it's awful (to me—apparently someone likes it). I've not had another name-brand non-super-cheap bottled water that was outright bad.
Every now and then I'll get a cheap gas station or local brand bottle of water (when traveling, say) and on the first sip it's like "yep, that's just not-very-good tap water, not even filtered". Other times it's fine, but it's pretty obvious the ones that just went with whatever the cheapest local source was and didn't do anything to it.
Dasani is owned by Coca Cola and is very much filtered. Taste could differ based on the source of water though. But I would be skeptical of being able to taste the difference if the source of water was the same.
That said there was a YouTube video about 4 years ago for bottled water in China. They tested like 8 Brand’s of bottled water and all contained stuff that could make you sick and the suggestion was to still boil water.
It's not about the actual thing, it's how consuming it makes you feel. So if drinking one beer makes you feel cool and part of a group and another beer that tastes the same doesn't, then many people will think the first beer is authentic and more real.
In a way the author of the article is actually wanting this phantom sense of belonging and authenticity. They are looking for that feeling of buying and consuming stuff.
The tests with water are funny, when knowing the name or price people pick the most expensive one as the best tasting, when it turns out that all the bottles were filled with tap water.