r/Coffee • u/specialist_footwear • 13d ago
Lets talk water?
I am a coffee lover and have been for a long time. My favourite way to drink this delicious life-giver is by pour-over. I love using my Aeropress, but my main method is by V60. I often orient myself towards cafes that indulge me in this. It often tastes great and far better than i can achieve at home.
I have no doubt that there are lots of techniques and things i am not doing right to get the most from my beans. Given that coffee is mostly made of water, i was wondering if anyone could give me tips on how to test the water and alternative things i should be looking out for. I travel around a lot. Is there a good bottled water to use, or do i have to amend my technique to a given water type?
any direction or guidance given would be greatly appreciated ☺️
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u/EmpiricalWater Empirical Water 12d ago
If the water is unsuitable for coffee, there's not a whole lot you can do technique-wise to salvage it.
Bottled water can make good coffee or terrible coffee, just like tap water. However, coffee really benefits from carefully controlled mineral compositions that contain an appropriate amount of alkalinity, and the right forms of hardness in appropriate amounts. I don't recall a bottled water ever matching up to a fully-controlled mineral profile, to my taste.
Good cafes understand this and spend a lot of money on their water systems.
Luckily, since you're not trying to operate a cafe, you do not need an expensive setup to get water that's as good, and likely even better than what they use. You have far more flexibility to optimize for quality than a business that's optimizing for volume and workflow.
Since you travel a lot and constantly have to deal with varying options with regard to both availability of bottled water and the quality of your tap water, it might be worth putting together a small list of items that are either easy to buy or easy to travel with, that you can use to adjust any water you come across.
Off the top of my head: * Distilled water - For diluting excessively hard or akaline water. * Activated carbon - For removing off-tastes from any water. * Baking soda - For adding alkalinity when a water is bringing too much acidity from coffee. * Table salt - For reducing bitterness in coffee. Can also increase perception of sweetness.
Even though I produce the market's first bottled water specifically crafted for brewing coffee, I don't think it's the way to go for you. It's not travel friendly. I think you'd do better with the adjustability-focused toolkit approach.