Improve your home-brew effortlessly with these bottled waters
BY DANNY NGUYEN
It doesn’t taste good!
Something isn’t right!
It’s too heavy!
Or worse…
It’s bland!
I’ve tried everything?!?!
If you ever come across such frustration when you can’t get your pour-over right, it’s likely that it’s not your fault, but the waters! Water plays arguably the most important role when it comes to filter coffee as it makes up more than 98% of the final cup. In the world of competitive level coffee brewing, coffee is often brewed with customized water with controlled mineral contents which are exhaustingly tasted multiple times by trained palates to get the most optimal result.
It can often come down to a milli-milligram of mineral content that makes or breaks your cup.
Knowledge of tap water’s mineral content is limited, and if you insist on knowing so, it may cost you a fair bit of time and money for laboratory analysis.
Moreover, we are only just scratching the surface of the problem. Here sums up a few generic ideas that you want to know (not necessary to remember, we’ll bypass all the overwhelming chemistry and mathematics and give you as a hassle-free solution at the end of this).
There has been a well-known theory that mineral content in water influences the coffee extraction process, which suggests that different mineral molecules with different chemical characteristics attract and react with flavor compounds differently. As the result, it brings different flavor compounds out of the cup and therefore changes the taste of the pour-over. This theory is explained in detail in the book “Water for Coffee” written by Dr. Christopher Chendon. In the book, he summarizes that the top 3 minerals that affect pour-over coffee are magnesium, calcium, and bicarbonate. We can’t divulge all of his findings in the scope of this blog post, however, if you find this interesting, we highly recommend you to get yourself a copy of Water for Coffee.
A recent experiment carried out by Dr. Monika Fekete, a strong advocator for coffee and water research, let a panel of coffee professionals blind taste two sets of filter coffee. One coffee was brewed with pre-mineralized water and the other is brewed with pure water with minerals added afterwards (all brewed with the same coffee and recipe). The result? Surprisingly most attendees found the cups were very similar, agreed that the difference could just be of the brewing process, and could not identify which cup was which. This experiment suggests a new theory that minerals content in water may have nothing to do with the extraction but rather affect our taste buds, and thus, flavor perception.
Which theory is closer to being correct?
Are there any other hidden scientific theories yet to be discovered?
How exactly do minerals’ affect the final cup’s flavor?
These questions are far from being conclusively answered. For now, we can only use the final resulting flavors as our metric.
Problems are raised - but how can we navigate through such problems and achieve a consistent result?
As mentioned earlier, competitive brewers control the mineral content of their brewing water by adding an exact amount of minerals into pure water. This process consists of putting precisely weighted milligrams of minerals (which requires expensive micro-scales) into pure water, brewing it with a specific recipe, to often taste it and find out it isn’t quite right. This process is repeated multiple times before they reach an optimal result. Such a tedious process is only suitable when brewing very expensive coffees for a panel of world-class coffee tasters.
The good news: there are plenty of alternatives that you can pick up on your grocery run if your tap water doesn’t perform. Many readily available water bottles sold in supermarkets are more than good enough for your daily brew (and they are also very consistent in their mineral contents to ensure consistency).
We conducted an experiment with widely available bottles at supermarkets to find out a quick way to fix your morning brew without the hassle.
We selected 9 different water bottles on our supermarket run:
Voss, Frantelle spring water, Evian, Pureau, North Brook spring water, Balance, Officeworks aqua to go, Alkapower and Woolworths spring water
The experiment was conducted as follows:
Each water is used to brew 3 different coffee’s from 3 different roasteries:
Padres honey processed Colombian, CodeBlacks washed Ethiopian, and our very own God’s Honest Truth washed Kenyan.
We used the following recipe:
15g of medium-coarse ground coffee (around 8 o’clock on EK43) and 225g of 93C water poured as following stages:
0:00 - 30g
0:30 - 60g
1:00 - 160g
1:45 - 225g
Brew time is between 2’45” and 3’
Tds is between 1.4% and 1.5% across every cup.
Each set of coffee is then given to everyone in the roastery to blindly taste. They then score each cup’s characteristics, namely: acidity, sweetness, flavors, body, aftertaste, and balance from a value of 1-5, 1 being the lowest perceived quality. We used a simplified scoresheet instead of the official SCA one, for it is closer to how we generally perceive the cup quality daily, and hence better serves the purpose of the experiment.
All the scores are then averaged and plotted; the results are shown in the graphs below:
These graphs show the trend that different water affects the flavors of the final cup, the easy way to interpret these graphs is looking at their shapes. The smaller the web, the flatter the cup, and the more skewed the web, the less balance the cups are. Therefore, we can see that:
Officeworks aqua to go, Pureau, Evian and Woolworths spring water generally produce flatter cups across all coffee. Pure water also gives slightly more acidity, but very high quality while Evian and Woolworths spring water tend to produce a heavier cup.
Alkapower and Balance, which have a lower ph level, surprisingly produce more balance and bring out more flavours in the cup consistently across all coffees, with Alkapower water tending to give more acidity and body while Balance water giving more intense flavour.
Frantelle spring water came second in the experiment, getting higher score in all aspects which means a more balanced and flavorful cup.
Voss water reigns the champion in our experiment as it produces the most balance and intense flavour, and being the cleanest out of all the waters tried, it can be seen from much bigger webs than the rest.
The ranking of water bottle for brewing coffee is below, with 1 being the favorite.
Voss
Frantelle spring water
Balance
Alkapower
Northbrook spring water
Woolworth spring water
Evian
Officework aqua to go
Pureau
So next time, if you aren’t quite happy with your brew at home and can’t really figure out a good recipe for it, it may be because your water is either too soft or too hard. Save yourself the mess of mixing minerals and grab one of these bottles from the list above! Bottled water surely can’t perform as good as customized water, but it can significantly improve your cup right away, without any hassle.
There are lots more bottled waters out there and we’d love to brew with them - if you have any brands in mind, please let us know in the comment section and we’ll try it in our next experiment.