Water Recipe Calculator (for reference):
Hello all. Have just discovered this thread, so my apologies if Iām asking questions that have already been answered multiple times in the past.
I have recently been trying to up my coffee game. I currently have a Bodum 6 cup pour over with mesh filter, an OXO burr grinder, and a fairly generic electric kettle that doesnāt have a gooseneck. I have been buying whole bean coffee roasted locally, measuring before grinding (60g/liter is what Iāve been doing).
- Do the knowledgeable folks here feel like Iām on the right path here? I have definitely noticed a difference from the pre-ground, machine brewed stuff I drank before.
- Is there consensus on what grind size I should be using? Iāve basically just stuck with the 8-9 (medium) setting on the grinder. Always nervous about experimenting and ruining a brew of good beans.
- Iāve been watching James Hoffman on YT, and have settled on his pour-over method (120g water bloom, then up to 480g water, then the rest of the liter). Is this a good way to be doing this, or is there a better method?
Thanks in advance for any advice.
this immersion bloom seems pretty interesting but good lord itās a lot of futzing to manage the temperature
What I liked better was the first vid where he separates the brew into 4-5 different parts then samples the results of each. If the good stuff is mostly up front then shorter extraction is probably ideal and vice versa.
Sounds like youāre on the right track but pour over can be extremely complicated if youāre aiming for complete control over the brew parameters. Thereās a ton of stuff in this thread that you can probably find by searching V60. Are you happy with your coffee or do you feel like itās missing something?
Well, I wouldnāt really know if I was missing something probably, lol. For years, I used pre-ground Dunkin Donuts coffee in my Ninja coffee maker. Then we started using the method I talked about above. Demonstrably better. Tried an Ethiopian and a Brazil. Definitely liked the Brazil better. Ethiopian wasnāt bad by any means, but the Brazil was better to my wife and I.
right, it seems like just tossing the ābadā parts, regardless of when they get extracted, should be pretty easy but the way they combine makes this a lot more complicated in reality I guess.
tried the immersion/pourover today, I wonāt say it was a total disaster but it didnāt go well. I dumped the bloom into the cone and it clogged worse than Iāve ever seen, just off the charts slow (I expected this was a possibility but the level of clogging was shocking, it took over 10 minutes with 15g of grinds and 250g of water). Resulting coffee wasnāt terrible but definitely over-extracted. May try it again once I get some of the non-tabbed v60 filters. With enough time I could probably re-dial the grind to adjust to this but I donāt have enough of this bean left to really make it worthwhile.
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I found another video where he goes more in depth on this immercolation process. Looks like heās using about half of the brew water for the immersion which should be more liquidy when pouring. Starting at about 10:30 you can see he pours at āan angleā on the side of the cone to get the slurry behave nicely.
But yeah this is too much work for daily coffee if it doesnāt add substantial consistency or cup quality. I think heās mostly using this as a competition process with competition-grade coffees.
I think I may have found one of these coffees that tastes better with distilled water. Have to do more testing first though.
Was there anything you specifically liked better about it? Ethiopian coffees have the widest range of profiles in my experience, but the one unifying trait they seem to have is uniqueness / weirdness. There are a dozen or so common cultivars of arabica coffee grown around the world like bourbon, pacamara, caturra, and catuai. You can read more about them here:
https://varieties.worldcoffeeresearch.org/varieties
However, Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee, and there are at least thousands of different cultivars there, most of which have not been specifically named or identified. Brazilian coffees tend to more similar in profile to what North American coffee drinkers are used to or seeking, which is to say low acidity with notes of nut, chocolate, caramel, and sometimes spices. Ethiopian coffees are often (but not always) described as āfruit bombsā that can be sweet, acidic, and floral. Itās not uncommon to see tasting notes of blueberry, cotton candy, and jasmine.
There are many factors that determine the final cup quality though, especially the type of processing (washed, natural, honey, anaerobic, etc.) and roast level (lighter preserves more unique origin characteristics while darker removes them). At the moment, Iām drinking a Brazilian natural that I would have guessed as Ethiopian in a blind test with prominent notes of sweet lemon and rose-like florals.
I donāt know if there was anything I could specifically say we liked about it. I think, if Iām using context clues correctly, the Ethiopian was more acidic(?), which was ok, but we definitely liked the Brazil more. I always thought I liked light/medium roasts more, but I think that Iām finding that medium/dark is more my style.
I went finer on the grind this morning (8 to 7 on the OXO), and I donāt think I like that as well. So, I guess Iāll go the other way and see what I think.
I appreciate your thoughts, and the reading material. :)
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Iām still not sure about this but am now absolutely certain that I need equipment to test water for mineral hardness and pH. The water blend that I normally use is relatively soft compared to what would be recommended for coffee (no clue about alkalinity). I ran out of distilled water which I use to dilute everything and brewed with some harder waters: all were undrinkable (overextracted) with this Brazil. They werenāt obvious bitter or astringent either, just pulling out some new awful flavor that is overpowering. Tried a bottled water with low TDS / high acidity and the result was undextracted with tartness. I have some of the Barista Hustle recipe water put back for reference and it was just as bad as using pure spring water or filtered tap. That is pretty jarring since it should be āgoodā for coffee brewing.
Next supermarket trip is either today or tomorrow so Iāll load up on various waters. But I want to know what kind of waters you are using. Is there a particular type that you prefer? Let me know in the comments below. /Hoffman
Heh. I just use tap water because Iām a noob.
lol
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Is it just me or is it weird that he ends every video that way?
I got the untabbed hario filters from prisma andā¦ wow. what the hell, how can they even pretend the tabbed shit is the same product??? comparatively, the tabbled filters feel like theyāre made out of cardboard.
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Lol I donāt know if they are pretending or not but they arenāt the same at all. I have a PSA about filters. For the first rinse, I use hot tap water and quickly fill the cone all the way to the top. This lets me see the maximum unrestricted flow rate. Spoiler alert: not all filters are the same, and not all filters within the same package are the same. Yesterday I pulled an untabbed V60 and not only did the flow start slow with a full cone, it stalled with over an inch of water left in the cone. This is the pre-rinse before the coffee. Just cone, filter, water, and it clogged. First one Iāve ever thrown out because of that.
Coffee Water Basics
Recently I brewed some amazing followed by undrinkable coffee where I only changed the water and it had me questioning everything. Iāve been āmakingā water for a while, but my approach was the simplest one for producing something reasonable and repeatable at low cost. I decided to dig back into it, jog my memory, and figure out what really matters. Spoiler: it mostly boils down to two things. Cliffs first and details last.
(Assumption: Weāre talking about clear and odorless water.)
Cliffs
The two parameters that matter most are alkalinity and total hardness, and probably in that order. Higher alkalinity ā more stable pH, and higher hardness ā more minerals to extract coffee compounds. The targets are 40 ppm (mg/L) and 50-175 ppm (mg/L), respectively. Note well that alkalinity has a rather precise target and most professionals donāt deviate much from that number.
Practical Recommendation
The simplest way to see if this makes a difference in your coffee is to buy water that already meets these specs. Even if your tap water report is āgood,ā those are averages and the daily variation is probably high. Here are some bottled waters that test at or near all of the SCA targets:
Mont Blanc
Volvic
Crystal Geyser Alpine Spring Water
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TL;DR VERSION
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The first parameter is (total) alkalinity and likely the most important based on my reading and preliminary taste tests. Alkalinity is the amount of buffer or ability to neutralize acids and stabilize pH. Sometimes itās called carbonate hardness (KH), but it should not be confused with alkaline pH (>7) which is a different concept. The SCA target for alkalinity is precise at 40 ppm (mg/L) of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) with an āacceptableā (read: not optimal) range of 40 to 70. Most of the professional water recipes Iāve seen cluster at 40 and rarely surpass 50.
The second parameter is total hardness, sometimes referred to as just hardness or general hardness (GH). This is the total calcium and magnesium concentration expressed as CaCO3. Youāre already familiar with this concept as āhardā water being rich in minerals. Those minerals, specifically Ca and Mg, are important for extracting coffee compounds with the expectation that too little may result in flat, boring coffee while too much may result in heavy, bold coffee. The SCA ideal value is 70 ppm but with a fairly wide target range of 50-175 ppm. Most recipes seem to fall in the 50-100 ppm range. (Note that TDS and calcium hardness are two related but slightly different concepts with different ranges.)
A deeper factor that may be worth considering is that the Ca:Mg ratio is not reflected in the total hardness, but you can usually get it from a water quality report. Why would that matter? People have speculated that these ions might extract differently, and there seems to be some evidence for this*. However, whether itās taste perceptible doesnāt seem clear to me yet. If true, optimally extracting a coffee could require not only hitting the correct KH/GH values but also the Ca/Mg ratio most suitable to that particular coffee.
There are a few other SCA targets including 7 pH (range: 6.5 to 7.5) and 10 ppm sodium. Iām not sure how much these matter in relation to the above factors but it seems reasonable to start with ~neutral water. The Na content is less important than Ca/Mg according to a paper Iāve linked at the end. Note that these recommendations are for brewed coffee; espresso water is a bit different due to scale issues.
Practical Guidelines for Brew Water
Tap waterāeven of high qualityācan and does vary considerably from day to day and thus poses a problem for flavor test reliability. I recommend buying water thatās already known to be at or near the targets if you want the simplest approach to isolating the effects of water in your coffee. So far, my research indicates that Mont Blanc, Volvic, and Crystal Geyser should work (in the order Iād prefer them). Iām not sure about availability or cost, although I suspect most artisan waters will be pricey. Consider them as limited-run experiments rather than permanent solutions.
A slightly more involved approach is to blend waters, my preferred method. For example, I recently bought one liter of Evian to dilute with distilled water. Since Evian is extremely hard, the correct ratio is roughly 6 parts distilled to 1 part Evian which is more cost effective than, say, all parts Volvic. According to my calculations, the blend should be about 41 KH and 51 GH. Surprisingly, this didnāt make good coffee and extracted some awful flavors, so maybe I didnāt hit those numbers or perhaps something else is happening. This leads to another point though: bottled water will also vary somewhat, but likely far less than most tap waters. Measuring these values with useful accuracy requires special equipment that is neither cheap nor practical. Instead, Iād call it feasible for a coffee enthusiast.
This is all top level stuff that is widely known and the rabbit hole goes much deeper. For example, a more advanced technique than blending is buying dry minerals, a milligram scale, and some pipettes and crafting your own brew water to exact specifications. The KH and GH solutions are usually prepared and stored as separate concentrates so that one-off recipes can easily be crafted. Iāve done it and itās kind of a pain in the ass. Some additional reading:
Large variability in quality tap water (easy read):
*Paper examining Ca / Mg / Na ion extraction potential of coffee compounds (dense read):
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/jf501687c
Measurement equipment and procedures:
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A little more info on these waters Iāve recommended:
Mont Blanc seems to be unobtanium in USA#1.
Volvic is available but you may have to order it and expect to pay $1.50 to $2 per liter.
Crystal Geyser is $1.08 per gallon at Walmart. The only disadvantage is that itās drawn from several sources and Iāve read that KH/GH varies depending on source. Itās the cheapest and easiest by far though.