Our first 2024 âRE: Summer Seriesâ is all about the one ingredient that comprises 98.5% of our cups of coffee⌠water! While easily overlooked, water quality can greatly influence the amount of coffee flavors extracted from your beans. The right water can enhance the coffee's natural characteristics, while poor-quality water can result in a flat, bitter, off-flavored, or unpleasant cup. In this article, weâll explore the 3 scientifically-proven elements in your water that can significantly impact your coffee brewing: purity, hardness, and pH.
These 3 attributes are officially recognized in the Specialty Coffee Association Brewing Water Standards as follows: (1) Purity (clean odor, zero chlorine); (2) Calcium Hardness between 50-175 ppm; and (3) pH 7-8.
Purity
Water purity is an essential factor for any great cup of coffee, and one you can easily influence with a good water filter! Chlorine and other impurities can impart undesirable flavors to your coffee, and contaminants can lead to off-flavors. Spring, bottled, or a good filtered water has always been - and will always be - behind any great cup of coffee youâll ever brew!
Hardness
Water hardness refers (primarily) to its magnesium and calcium content (aka multivalent cation concentration). This means, a water that is âhardâ will have many cations, and a water that is âsoftâ wonât have as many. Why are they so important? Theyâre important because the flavor compounds in coffee happen to exist as aprotic, charge-neutral species and as a collection of acids and conjugate salts - all of which need cations (i.e. the Mg+ and Ca+ in your water) to extract into your brew! If water is too soft (i.e. has too few cations to extract), your coffee wonât taste so good! There is, however, a limit to how hard youâd want your water to be, particularly if you care about the longevity of your coffee equipment - if the water is too hard, these cations have a tendency to crystallize inside your machine and within the pipework, blocking flow, causing corrosion and leading to an eventual âearly deathâ for your brewers, particularly Espresso brewers. Most studies agree that 50-80 ppm CaCO3 hardness is ideal for both flavor and equipment performance. The easiest way to know how âhardâ is your local water (without testing it yourself), is to search for âCity, State Water Quality Report Hardnessâ - one of the first results should be the most recent test that your City conducted (in Lakeland, our water is around a 150 ppm - still within the SCA ideal standard, yet hardly ideal for our equipment⌠which is why we must de-scale them periodically!)
pH
pH is the indicator of acidity or alkalinity - below 7, it indicates an acidic solution, and pH greater than 7 indicates an alkaline solution. For coffee extraction, the amount of flavor extracted increases as the pH increases until you reach very high alkalinity, which can lead to chalky flavors being extracted. A neutral to slightly alkaline pH, between 7 and 8 has been consistently found to be best. Again the easiest way to know the pH of your local water (besides a water pH meter) is in your Cityâs Water Quality Report (in Lakelandâs most recent report it was 7.8)
We hope you enjoyed learning about water today, and please know we always welcome your questions and topics for future articles⌠weâll also be doing technical âSummer Seriesâ on FB/Instagram (@ethosroasters) starting this week, so we hope youâll enjoy those short videos as well! Oh! And the new 2024 Ethereal Summer Blend just launched and will be with us for the Summer⌠and since Iâm already running a bit long here, please find all the details online (ethosroasters.com and on this monthâs âGreatness Timesâ)!
Love Brewing Greatness with you,
Lisbeth
Sources & Further Reading
