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Permalink Reply by Moffee Coff on March 13, 2012 at 2:22am

To my mind, It might be a more cost-effective idea but really depends ultimately on your purpose for use.

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Permalink Reply by Neal on March 13, 2012 at 6:25am

I was wondering about this as well. I know that the wrong water can lead to sour taste or worse. My first thought was distilled water as it doesn't come any more pure than that, but read some place that it doesn't work well for espresso. Hopefully some of these experienced Baristas will have some insight.

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Permalink Reply by russ on March 14, 2012 at 12:41am

Actually the best water would become problematic due to scaling issues, so id recommend using a tds meter and hardness test strips to maintain a hardness of around 5 grains and a tds of between 200-300 ppm. The overall tds is far less important than the hardness.

Neal said:

I was wondering about this as well. I know that the wrong water can lead to sour taste or worse. My first thought was distilled water as it doesn't come any more pure than that, but read some place that it doesn't work well for espresso. Hopefully some of these experienced Baristas will have some insight.

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Permalink Reply by Ambrose Tham on March 14, 2012 at 12:58am

Thanks everyone for your thoughts.  I know for a fact that distilled water doesn't work well because the coffee grounds don't seem to dissolve well with distilled water.  Will keep discovering!

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Permalink Reply by Brady on March 14, 2012 at 3:42am

Lots of info out there on the subject.

The SCAA has a water quality handbook that discusses the optimal parameters, will look around and see if I can find something on it later. (They were sold out the last time I went to buy it... maybe I ought to do that).

Jim's Insanely Long Water FAQ is also a good read, over on Home-Barista.

The machine manufacturers I deal with prefer to see water be more like 2 grains and 50 PPM. They will not warranty machines if hardness is over 3. Take a look at your machine's installation spec sheet and see if there are any recommendations there.

Distilled water is bad because it is too good of a solvent. Overextracted nastiness will result.

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Permalink Reply by Eric Schaefer on April 1, 2012 at 9:44am

At my old shop we ran reverse-osmosis and blended filtered water back in to get up to ~120 ppm TDS (around the SCAA recommendation.)  That gives enough minerals for fill probes and other sensors to work properly and much better flavor than distilled, but also minimizes impurities, off flavors, and excessive scale build up in the machines.  Our tap water started around 6-7 grains hardness and 350ppm TDS, so we were going about 2/3 RO, 1/3 filtered tap and the resulting hardness should've been around 2 grains, though I don't specifically remember anymore if I measured post-treatment hardness.  Anyway, this level of hardness and TDS worked quite well for us.  If you wanted to run off of bottles, you'd probably want to measure the hardness and tds of the water to see what you're getting.  I've tried to look up info in the past and had no luck finding specs from the water bottle companies.  Good luck!

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Permalink Reply by Ambrose Tham on April 2, 2012 at 3:52am

great information everyone! i suppose some self discovery is needed at this point.

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