You get carbonic acid when carbonating water and some people like that taste, for some reason 🤷‍♂️

It's crazy tho how I was thinking similarly after posting the previous comment. If cabonated water gets the bitterness from carbonic acid, what would hydrogenated or nitrogenated water taste like? I've had Guiness and Pepsi Nitro. Both are made bubbly with nitrogen. And while the beer is good, the Pepsi just tasted like normal Pepsi, but like you had left it unsealed overnight.

Never had anything that was artificially hydrogenated, though. 🤔

Chemistry teacher here! Hydrogen would only acidify it if it dissociated. Much like how you can dissolve oxygen or nitrogen gas into water, any gas can be dissolved into water. They don't break apart, they just float as molecules inside the water. It's just like when sugar dissolves. Salt breaks apart, because it's ionic. Sugar, most organics, and diatomic gases like H2, N2, and O2 don't have enough affinity with the water molecules to dissociate (or, at least, not sufficient to dissociate appreciably)

When you get something gnarly is if you have a molecule containing something that does have stronger affinity with the water. Carbon Dioxide, Sulfur Di- and Trioxide, Nitrogen Oxides, and other oxygen-bearing covalent gases react with water because the central atoms attract the oxygen in the H2O, while the oxygens surrounding them have partial negative charges from the unpaired electrons, attracting the hydrogens in the water. This causes the water to be ripped apart, creates oxyanions such as CO3^2-^, SO3^2-^, SO4^2-^, NO2^-^, or NO3^-^, and leaves protons in the water from the now-dissociated Hydrogens (except for weak acids such as Carbonic Acid, which only partly dissociate from the hydrogen, such that all intermediate species are actually in equilibrium: H2CO3, HCO3^-^, CO3^2-^, and CO2). Same goes for elemental Chlorine, Fluorine and Bromine. All of these rip the water apart and create the hypo- oxyacid and the hydroacid of the specie (e.g. Cl2 + H2O --> HClO + HCl)

Most soda has a pH of like 3, so probably can't be muchh worse.

No, hydrogen (gas) doesn't spontaneously dissociate into H^+^ when dissolved in water because it's covalently bonded; it remains H2, just like nitrogen remains N2 when dissolved in water. Acidity is a measure of the concentration* of H^+^, so dissolving H2 doesn't impact the acidity.

*actually the activity

Actually why it was news; some dude got drunk, belched fireballs at people and burnt the shit out of his esophagus.