Brita or Mineral water which is better ?

by **gabriel** on Thu Jul 10, 2008 11:09 am

The water in my area are very hard so until now I have been using only mineral water which is a real PITA
A friend I talked with said that Brita water should be good enough for my espresso machine (Silvia)

Is that true ?
I'm not speaking about flavor (which I will be able to judge myself), but about machine durability.
Many times I realized in the morning that I got no mineral water (e.g. if I had many guests the night before) and then I skip the morning espresso ritual fearing a damage to my machine
Is this excessive ?

thx
/gabi

by **roblumba** on Thu Jul 10, 2008 11:51 am

I wrote a little blurb in another post and I'll repost it because it's the same advice I would give in your situation.

I highly recommend if you are using bottled water, to go out and get a 5-gallon jug and a 1 gallon jug from Whole Foods. Now, fill your 5-gallon jug with water from one of the many local Pure Water or equivalent stores. Now here's the slightly tricky part. You don't want pure reverse osmosis water because it has practically zero hardness and doesn't optimize the taste for your espresso. Get a HACH 5B test kit from http://www.hach.com. They are $14 plus shipping, etc and you can test the hardness accurately and many times with this kit. You basically want your water hardness to test to about 3 drops of from this kit which equals about 51 mg / L hardness. Once you get the kit you'll know what I mean. In my case I tested my tap water and it was something like 150 mg / L. With a little trial and error, I found that I only needed to add around 12 ounces of my tap water to a 1 gallon jug of Pure Water to come up with 51 mg / L hardness. So now I have tasty espresso water that doesn't scale up my machine.

by **quar** on Thu Jul 10, 2008 2:37 pm

Umm...Using mineral water in an espresso machine is a really bad idea....You're trying to avoid, not introduce, minerals into your machine. Do you mean bottled water?

I'd agree with roblumba's example of mixing your own custom hardness (it's what I do myself), but I'd recommend a cheap Hanna TDS meter vs the test kit. You should be able to find them online for no more that $20 USD. Ebay is a good source.

Mike

by **roblumba** on Thu Jul 10, 2008 2:56 pm

Are cheap TDS meters accurate enough at the lower level of hardness that we are trying to measure? I saw those but I was not confident in their accuracy compared to the industry standard Hach 5HB test kit.

by **quar** on Thu Jul 10, 2008 3:10 pm

Well, the published specs on my particular meter (a Hanna TDS-1 $15.00 ish) are:

0-999ppm
+/- 2% Full Scale

The bottled water I buy is supposed to have a reading of 6 PPM, which is what I read with the Hanna meter. In addition, most of these meters can be calibrated by using a calibration solution with a known hardness.

That being said, this is mixing water for espresso, not a science project. IHMO, I'm not going to quibble over the 2% margin of error when anything between 50 and 100 (IIRC) PPM is in the safe range for reducing scale.

Mike

by **inputusername** on Thu Jul 10, 2008 3:16 pm

This is an interesting topic. I will soon be getting my first espresso machine (Salvatore One Black) and would like to start getting things in order. Water quality wise, our local tap water comes from the Missouri River and the report specifies a hardness of 110 mg/L - 171 mg/L. I also have a filter in my refrigerator for drinking water and it is a Puriclean II filter...unfortunately I can't find any specs on how much it should reduce the hardness. I suspect I would be well advised to get either one of these kits or a meter to test my water?

by **quar** on Thu Jul 10, 2008 3:21 pm

I prefer 110 ppm to compromise between hardness and taste. The average water filter doesn't do much to soften water. Brita pitchers have a small ability to reduce hardness, but that only lasts while the filter is somewhere around two weeks old or less. I just haven't had the time to install an under-sink filter/softener setup, but it's in the plan. For now, I have good results with mixing bulk water from Costco with tap water.

You should probably read this, http://www.big-rick.com/coffee/waterfaq.html

Mike

by **inputusername** on Thu Jul 10, 2008 3:57 pm

quar wrote:You should probably read this, http://www.big-rick.com/coffee/waterfaq.html

WOW!!! That is quite the document!


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