Why does flat soda water still taste funny?

Club soda has some salt in it as well.

The flavor of flat soda water is the taste of carbonic acid. Carbonic acid is what you get when CO2 is dissolved in water. Even flat soda still has lots of dissolved CO2, just not enough to create fizz.

So if I were to get a straw and glass of water and I blew bubbles in it for several minutes, it would eventually taste like flat soda water?

@simone54 Fun idea, but no. First off, there’s really not much CO2 in your breath—only about 5% of that air is CO2. A very little bit of that would go into solution, but not enough to taste.

To get lots of CO2 into solution, you’d want the water to be as cold as possible, and you’d want to put both the gas and the water under lots of pressure. So it would help if you did your bubble blowing at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.