Maybe it's a desert rat thing then. During my time in North Africa I could never really get used to drinking hot beverages in scorching heat. I love the good old Arab tea with plenty of sugar and hopefully a bit of fresh mint, but it's just not the best thing to ward off dehydration.

I learned pretty quickly that nothing beats plain water for thirst, the cooler the better. The locals were of the same mind, even though they loved an occasional can of Coke (and possibly a secret sip of something high-proof when noone was watching) to lighten their day. I can't recall ever seeing anyone boiling water just to disinfect it. Fuel was in very short supply anyway so it wouldn't be practical.

We would drink whatever water was available, even from pretty awful looking wells full of trash, camel poo and stuff probably far worse than that. I always used chlorine tabs when the source was suspect. The Bedouin all drank straight from the well, I guess they were used to the local fauna. I never once got sick from drinking bad water, though I did get the inevitable diarrhoea from eating inadequately cooked food.

Anyway, it's horses for courses and boiling sure works fine in many situations. Honestly speaking though, it's rarely the most convenient option. It requires either building a fire or carrying a portable stove and fuel. Then it's a matter of bringing the water to the boil, which in my experience never quite beats the microwave, but I digress. Then it's cleaning the soot off the pot, packing everything back together and you still end up with a canteen full of flat warm water that tastes just terrible when your body core is overheating already.

So all in all, it would appear to me that disinfecting suspect water with a tiny chlorine tab is a whole lot less work to achieve pretty much the same thing. Even a good filter would work as a convenient alternative.

Boiling IMHE is only really practical in the long term when staying put at a fixed location with plenty of fuel available ... or if the water is so bad that chlorine tabs and filters can't handle the task. Which fortunately is rarely going to be the case in places we're likely to frequent, unless one attempts to drink water from a cesspit or some place with heavy chemical contamination. Not that boiling is going to help with the latter anyway.

But again, YMMV. This is no desert rat speaking, just a simple backwoods boy who prefers his water cold.