The Importance of Water in Quality Coffee

Water for coffee is rarely just water. It will always have something called Total Dissolved Solids (TDS), which are tiny minerals and organisms that are present in your water, whether they come from soil, water treatment, or your water supply system, and they affect the final result of your brew.

However, how and to what extent they will affect your coffee depends on what the compounds are and how many parts per million (PPM) they are in the water.

Magnesium, calcium, and bicarbonate are three common compounds, and all have a strong effect on the flavor of your brew. For example, Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood and Christopher Hendon found that bicarbonate acts as a buffer, regulating the acidity in your coffee. If added in the wrong amount, your coffee can taste dull and bland.

It’s really hard to taste the difference in TDS levels when drinking plain water, but the real difference is when you start brewing coffee. Various minerals affect not only the taste of coffee, but also how and to what extent it dissolves.

“Perfect Water”: Is there such a thing?
Let’s say you want to improve your brew by using great water but don’t want to experiment too much. The good news is that the SCA has published their own guidelines:

“The water used for coffee extraction must be odorless and hygienic.
Must have total hardness between 50-175 ppm CaCO
Must have an alkalinity between 40-75 ppm CaCO3 (2.2-4.2 °d)
The pH value should be between 6 and 8.”

So how easy is it to achieve this? Unfortunately, tap water in our country cannot provide these qualities. Market waters provide much more optimum results in this sense, but our advice to you is not to be afraid to try different brands of water.

There is no one perfect water composition that produces consistently delicious extractions from all roasted coffees. The brands that we find most suitable for our roasting profiles and get optimum results are Assu, Abant, Buzdağı, Özkaynak waters. However, as it is known, spring waters are waters whose mineral density can change from time to time.

So, you probably won’t get the “perfect” water every time, but you can improve the quality by adhering to SCA guidelines.