Today we're gonna be talking about the best water to use,
to make the most delicious cup of coffee.
If that's made you roll your eyes and you're thinking,
"Ah, now I have to worry about the water that I brew with.
It was already complicated enough."
Well, know that this topic makes me kind of angry,
more frustrated than anything else.
I wish it were easy.
I wish that any water would make any coffee taste good,
but that isn't the case.
And using water that has some problems
means that you're not gonna extract the coffee that you buy,
or you're gonna make the coffee that you extract
taste much worse.
So you're gonna ask, what makes water good or bad?
Surely if it tastes clean and pleasant, then it's good.
If it tastes kinda chloriny and disgusting, then it's bad.
And that is true, but it is unfortunately
a bit more complicated than that.
But if you do know a little bit about water chemistry
and coffee, know that we're not gonna get super hardcore
into the chemistry today.
So let me give you a very quick overview,
that is so simple, that I might feel like I'm lying to you.
There are two aspects to water and its contents
that are particularly important
when it comes to brewing coffee.
The first are the mineral ions.
Most commonly,
we're gonna talk about calcium and magnesium.
These are really useful ions.
If they're in the water, they actually help
with the extraction of the coffee flavors,
helping them go into solution,
to create a delicious cup of coffee.
If you have no mineral ions,
you'll have very little extraction
compared to having a lot of ions
and then having a lot of extraction.
But that doesn't mean that more is necessarily better.
Now the other thing to really worry about
is what's called the bicarbonate or alkalinity of the water.
This refers to the ability of that water
to sort of buffer its pH,
to maintain its pH around about seven.
If you have a lot of bicarbonate,
if you have a lot of alkalinity,
it'll take a lot more acid added to that
to turn the solution acidic.
In the case of coffee, well, coffee is pretty acidic.
When you extract a bunch of stuff in coffee,
those are acids.
It has a low pH when you brew it.
So the more buffer that you have,
the less acidity ultimately
you'll experience in your cup of coffee.
And again, more does not equal better.
Too little bicarbonate is a problem.
Those acids in the coffee will run rampant.
They'll be uncontrolled, unbalanced, unpleasant.
Too much buffer, then everything is just kind of boring,
dull, brown tasting, to be avoided.
With both of these things, there's a middle ground
where things tend to taste pretty great.
So what is that?
What is the perfect water?
Again, I can't give you a very simple answer for that.
Firstly, I will say,
if you buy from one roaster continuously,
if you buy their coffee all the time,
find out what their water is like.
Matching your water to theirs
as much as is possible or practical will get you much closer
to those notes that they're writing on the bag.
If you're brewing with water
that's a long way away from theirs,
you'll just have a very different taste experience to them,
which can be a little bit frustrating.
As for what might be a good guideline, well,
again, it's tricky, because calcium and magnesium,
while they are both mineral ions,
well, they're a little bit different.
They don't do the same job exactly.
And having the same amount of calcium in one water
as you have magnesium in another
will produce different tasting cups of coffee
when you brew with those two waters.
Generally speaking, a little bit more calcium is preferable
if that's your primary ion, a little bit less as preferable
if magnesium is your primary iron.
There are ways to tell how much stuff is in your water.
You can very cheaply get a TDS kit,
but that's not terribly helpful.
A TDS meter will give you the total dissolved solids
for the water, but it won't tell you what those solids are.
Could be all calcium, could be all magnesium, could be all,
something else that happens to conduct electricity.
It's not very insightful.
Aside from TDS meters, there are really two ways
that you can know about the composition of your water.
Firstly, if it's coming out of your tap,
well in many parts of the world,
you can put in your postcode or your zip code
into your water authorities website,
and they will give you an exhaustive breakdown
of the minerals inside that water.
That is definitely useful.
It's usually free in most parts of the world.
Go and check that out.
That's essential.
If the water has been treated or softened in some way,
then pretty much the best way to assess it
is with a dropper kit.
They're pretty cheap.
I'm gonna make sure there are links available,
and you take a sample of water
and you add drops to it until it changes color.
And those droplets give you an indication
of total hardness and carbonate hardness.
So those can be converted so you can find out
sort of how much mineral hardness is in there
and how much bicarb is in there too.
Really useful, not incredibly accurate,
but will certainly get you to a useful place.
So let's take an example.
Let's take my water.
Let's say it's 300 parts calcium.
It's got a really high level of bicarbonate.
What should it be?
What should I be aiming for?
If I'm trying to treat this water, where should I be going?
And that's a really difficult thing to tell you, right?
I like just to give you some numbers,
we'll give you a recipe, but there is no one answer.
All of this exists in a range, in a spectrum.
And so if I was talking about calcium,
I might say 30 to 50 parts calcium is good.
But if it was magnesium,
I might say more like 15 to 30 parts per million
or milligrams per liter is good.
Similarly with buffer,
I might say somewhere between 50, 75, maybe PPM.
So, while that's my recommendation,
know that there are other recommendations.
There are specs that are used
in international coffee competitions
that are available online.
The SCA, the specialty coffee association,
they offer a guideline, a kind of range for various things
when it comes to water quality.
That's free and available online.
So check that out too.
And if you really want to experiment
at the end of all of this, well, we'll do talk about that.
We'll talk about creating your own custom mineral water
and how you might do that, but we'll save that to the end.
So let's talk about treating water in the home, right?
Many people have bought things like Brita water filters
and does some extent for some good reason.
You know what I'm talking about, these things.
And these things are not what you want them to be.
They're not a solution and they're not an easy fix,
but they're not entirely bad.
These things do a little bit of softening, but not too much.
They definitely improve the taste of the water,
if your water has off tastes like chlorine
or other unpleasant flavors,
but they don't really do a great job softening.
So I'm not against them, but they don't fix the problem.
And bear in mind, the problem with hard water is not just
that it doesn't make great tasting coffee,
the problem with hard water is limescale.
And when it comes to coffee machines, espresso machines,
filter machines, heating that water up causes limescale
to precipitate out, and that can easily damage, break, clog,
frustrate your coffee machine.
In case you're curious how these things work,
well, we can take out a filter from these things
and we'll cut it open and we'll talk you through
what's going on inside one,
'cause I just think that's interesting.
So here's your familiar Brita filter.
And if we just open it up like this,
you can see that they're not particularly complicated things
inside.
At the top here, you've got a pretty simple filter mesh.
That is just like a tiny sieve
to remove any particular matter.
Make sure there's no floaty bits in the water
as it goes into the main filtration section.
And below that there are lots of these little tiny
kind of beads and there's two types here.
Now I'm pretty confident
that the darker ones are active carbon.
They're essentially kind of charcoal.
And what they do is mop up off tastes.
Any kind of chloriny flavors will get cleaned up
by active carbon.
If you see something is charcoal filtered for flavor,
that's what's going on.
The other little beads are,
essentially ion exchange beads.
They're negatively charged and they attract the calcium.
And in their place release a sodium ion.
Now that doesn't make the water salty typically.
You're not releasing sodium chloride, which is table salt.
You're just releasing these sodium ion on its own.
That does not form limescale.
And there's no health concerns or anything like that
with your salt intake, don't worry about this stuff.
It's just a nice way
to essentially switch out a calcium for a sodium.
It will do an okay job, but it is finite, right?
At some point it will release all of the sodium that it has.
And so it will not do any more softening.
And even brand new fresh,
they're not super, super effective with very hard water.
So what else can we do?
Well, you could add in a commercial water filter at home,
but most of the time that's just doing
what the Brita filter is doing on a much larger scale.
And it does make it much more effective,
but it also makes it way, way more expensive.
And then you have options like reverse osmosis
and I'll do my best to explain it quickly.
You press your mineralized water against a mesh
that is so fine that only water can get through,
but the minerals can't.
It's applied with pressure
and anything else essentially runs off
down the side of the filter and out and becomes waste.
Reverse osmosis units are incredibly wasteful.
What you get out of it though is nearly pure water.
Which again, isn't actually ideal.
If you put distilled water into a coffee machine,
well that's typically bad
because it can become quite corrosive.
And again, we know that we need some minerals
in order to get the best tasting coffee
from an extraction perspective.
So pure ARO is not desirable.
And there are some home units available.
And I'll be looking at a couple
in the not-too-distant future.
But in most cases they produce water
that's actually too soft.
It'll taste fine.
And it won't be so soft that it's actually corrosive,
but it won't be the best possible water.
You may need to find some way to remineralized it,
which can be complicated.
So again, that's not a great solution.
If your water's just a little bit hard, it's not super hard,
then something like a Brita is kind of actually okay
and not a terrible solution.
It'll get you kind of ballpark,
but certainly harder waters, they are a frustration.
So what else are your options?
Well, there's one option that's pretty popular,
but it is one of my least favorites.
It's inelegant, frustrating, wasteful,
environmentally unsound.
And that of course is bottled water.
In Europe and many parts of the world,
it's a kind of requirement in bottled water
to put the mineral content on the label, often on the back.
And they'll give you the exact quantity of magnesium
and calcium and your bicarbonate and a bunch of other stuff
in milligrams per liter, which is really useful.
And you could go out and find a mineral water
that works well for you.
I quite like this one,
even though it's way low on the mineral content,
but it still makes good tasting coffee.
But do remember, you're looking for a balance,
a balance of those minerals and that bicarb.
There are plenty of waters out there
that have what seem like the right mineral content,
but have inadequate bicarb.
They producing that's harsh and acidic
and a kind of unpleasant way.
So to be avoided.
But, I just can't recommend this to you.
I can't in all good consciousness, in good faith,
recommend something that is ultimately wasteful
and environmentally unsound.
It's definitely a solution.
And if you are occasionally in need of some special water
or some better brewing water,
yes, mineral water is an option.
But, I just feel like it's a very stupid solution
to a problem, but I can't deny it's a solution.
And so I have to talk about it here.
So what else have we got?
Well, one option is to get water from a local cafe
or a local roastery that treats its water.
Not every business is gonna do this for you.
Not every business is gonna be interested in that,
but I hope more and more get on board
with the idea of sharing the water that they're making.
Now I don't think I could ask a cafe
to give that away for free.
There is a cost for them
in creating good tasting water for coffee.
So I would expect to pay something,
not just expect them to give you two, three,
five liters of water for free, but talk to your local cafe.
They may be open to this.
Now we've covered a lot of ground here.
There's a lot of information
and you may want to do some more reading.
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Now, we're getting pretty low on options,
on solutions to the particular problem,
but there is one big one left that I do need to talk about,
but there's no way I can really, really get into it
without doubling or tripling the length of this video.
So perhaps when we'll talk more about in depth
in the future.
And that is about creating in your own custom mineral water.
If you joined me for the world's largest coffee tasting,
which we may do again soon,
then you've already been through that experience
of buying pure demineralized water
and adding a sachet minerals to it
in order to create a custom recipe.
And doing that in that case,
let people all around the world brew with identical water,
which I thought was just the coolest thing.
But you don't even need a sachet as much as third wave water
is a nice little solution
that is available just off the shelf.
If you wanna go harder than this,
you can.
You can get a bunch of distilled water
and go and buy your individual components.
For the mineral content,
you can use magnesium in the form of Epsom salt,
that's cheap and easy to get hold of.
And for the bicarbonate,
you can just use sodium bicarbonate, which is baking soda,
which is incredibly cheap and easy to get hold of.
And you can very simply put a small amount of those
into distilled water, and then carefully dilute that down
again into a much larger quantity of distilled water
to accurately, very carefully compose mineral water.
Now I just can't talk about this subject
without giving an enormous shout out to Barista Hustle.
Many of you are familiar with Barista Hustle,
it's Matt Perger is kind of coffee brain trust
that puts out enormous amounts of information
into the world.
If you are not aware of it,
go to baristahustle.com right now,
and stop watching this video
and go and learn some really cool stuff.
They did a ton of work on composing your own water.
They really popularized this.
They have calculators to do it yourself
to create your own recipes.
They have calculators
for taking very soft water from your tap
and mineralizing it a little bit more
to get it into a really good zone for coffee brewing.
This is unquestionably extreme as a solution.
It's a little bit expensive to buy demineralized water.
It's a little bit of your time and effort to do this stuff.
It requires accuracy and patience
and a willingness to do it,
but the results are really, really interesting
and are definitely enjoyable
when it comes to making delicious coffee in the morning.
It's really nice to just not worry
about the quality of water that you're brewing with.
And if you live in a hard water place,
that's an almost unimaginable thought.
So go and check out Barista Hustle,
have a little look at that.
There are recommendations from various people
like Scott Rao and others
on their recommended water and recipes.
And you can begin to understand how wide a range
there is around this.
And one more shout out has to go to Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood
and Christopher Hendon, who put together the kind of
seminal work, which is water for coffee,
which really dug into what's doing what and why.
It gives you a great primer on water chemistry.
I think it's pretty hard to get hold of at the moment,
but I'll stick some links in the description down below.
If you really want to understand this a little bit more,
I think it is great reading.
And again, this is not entirely new.
I remember reading great stuff by Jim Schulman,
way, way, way back in the early two thousands.
He'd done a bunch of work on this stuff too.
It's been a known problem for a long time.
Water really is the most frustrating thing.
It can hold you back from getting out the value and quality
that is in the bag of beans that you bought.
It drives me kind of crazy that it seems so simple,
but it's so complicated.
And little changes can have a massive, massive impact.
And you know what don't believe me,
think this is all a nonsense,
go and brew two cups of coffee, get a French press brew.
Two cups of coffee, one with soft water, one with hard.
It's not difficult to do.
And it will ruin your day,
because the difference is enormous.
And it's not just tasteable by professional tasters
or coffee geeks or obsessives, it's anyone.
Everyone can taste the difference between good water
and bad, but I'd like to hear your thoughts.
What are you doing for water at home?
You just use the tap water.
Is it soft enough or is it hard?
Do you feel frustrated sometimes that the coffee you make
simply is not as good as the coffee
from the local coffee shop?
That certain sparkle, that certain sweetness
that their coffee has, you just can't get
no matter how good your gear and how good your technique.
And so I hope this is a useful introduction to the topic.
Let me know what I missed.
Let me know if there's another treatment method
that you're using or another solution that you have.
Share it with us, share it with this community.
We would all appreciate anyone's ideas
and innovations on the subject.
I'm gonna say thank you so much for watching.
And I hope you have a great day.