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Water is a huge factor that I neglected for a while. It finally hit me once someone told me that coffee is mostly water, and your coffee is only as good as your
by jjice 7y ago
Water is a huge factor that I neglected for a while. It finally hit me once someone told me that coffee is mostly water, and your coffee is only as good as your water. Makes complete sense, but I had never thought about it. A simple Britta filter goes a long way.
- kalleboo 7y agoI have very low standards for coffee, use Starbucks bulk beans off of Amazon, and brew it in an automatic mill+drip machine. But a Brita filter for the water makes a world of difference.
- earthboundkid 7y agoWhereabouts do you live? I've visited places where I found tap water undrinkable (Pennsylvania, Florida), but never lived in such a place.
- kalleboo 7y agoJapan
- earthboundkid 7y agoI liked the water in Toyama, but they had a PR campaign to brand it as “oishii mizu” so people would forget about the cadmium poisoning in the Showa years. The PR campaign worked on me. :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itai-itai_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itai-itai_disease
- lostgame 7y agoThis is a simple tip that will change my life forever. So obvious, yet so important.
- greenshackle2 7y agoMaybe I'm missing something but I figured that since I drink my tap water and it tastes fine to me, it should be fine in my coffee.
- catalogia 7y agoTap water quality is very variable. In many parts of Florida for instance, tap water tastes and smells like burnt matches; tons of sulfur in that water. It's still safe to drink, but I expect people living in regions with tap water like that would get better results with bottled or filtered water.
- greenshackle2 7y agoRight, that's perfectly understandable, I'm just wondering if people think good quality tap water needs to be filtered too, e.g. maybe minerals affect extraction.
- mrguyorama 7y agoTry it out! Next time you shop, buy a gallon of distilled water and see if you prefer it
- jstarfish 7y agoNot really. I'm not a water snob or chemist but I've been around. What qualifies tap as "good" is highly subjective but on the one hand you have places like Florida where the tap is desalinated and tastes like farm runoff, and then you have places like Southern California where the mineral content/hardness of the water itself makes it taste like soapy bathwater. I've even noticed it vary within the same municipality-- in two apartments I rented in Atlanta, one mile apart, one had tap that tasted fine, the other (near a swamp) tasted like sewage (we were convinced groundwater was seeping into the water main). In cases of hard water, the brewing process seems to serve as its own distillery that separates minerals from the water. The resulting water/coffee tastes fine to me but you'll find all sorts of mineral buildup clogging your coffee maker if it doesn't have its own filtration system (my Cuisinart has a filter-on-a-stick that lowers into the water tank). Nothing seems to make Florida water palatable though. That taste passes straight through into the coffee, like burned urine. Use distilled.