I am curious in regards to the quality of the water that I am using in my new Cellini. I have tested it and it has less than 50 tds and Ph of about 6.5, the thing is its technicaly spring water. I have used it on all my machines and never had a problem, anyone have any feedback on this? Thanks

you could try water espresso search and reading.

Parker

Your water is strikingly similar to mine which comes from upstate New York aquifers. I have had no problems with it and itmakes wonderful espresso. I don't know if more minerals will help the taste and I'm about to find out as I am moving to a home with well water that will need a treatment system. You have no need whatsoever to use a brita or other filter. I did this at first to get my TDS down to ~20 and it was of no consequence for scaling and if anything from what I read could only hurt the taste. I did a descaling of my HX only after slightly more then a year of use and there was virtually nothing that came out. My system would not require descaling for a really long time using water right out of the tap.

Hope this helps

Can anyone say with absolute certainty that water hardness with a variation of a few grains makes a descernable difference in espresso flavor or body? Ive been experimenting (unscientifically) with various spring waters in varying dilution ratios and have not noticed any taste differneces whatsoever. Maybe this only plays out in larger volume extraction methods perhaps? Is there anyone who's had a eureka moment just from adjusting their water hardness and nothing else? I've been running very low mineral water in my machine all it's life (25ppm hardness) and have been rather pleased by the flavor, but I started to feel that maybe im missing something by using water that is so clean, and ive heard that it should be closer to 60ppm hardness for optimal taste. FWIW my friend has been using straight RO water (less than 9ppm hardness) and ive truly had the most insanely good shots I've ever experience from his machine. Maybe there are more important aspects of water quality that have a greater influence on taste other than the magnesium and calcium ion concentration.

I'm confident there was an objective improvement when I went from "no hardness" to "some hardness."

For a long time I had been using bottled spring water. Eventually, I tested it and found it to have virtually zero hardness. Mixing this ultra-soft spring water with a little tap water got the hardness up into the range recommended in the insanely long water FAQ written by Jim S. I noticed improvements in both mouthfeel and taste, but cannot prove either

Jim

Javacat wrote:Can anyone say with absolute certainty that water hardness with a variation of a few grains makes a descernable difference in espresso flavor or body?

I believe that the relationship of water chemistry to espresso extraction is much more complicated than simply taking the two or three most easily obtained results off an analysis and trying to draw conclusions from them. Although it is certainly feasible to remove nearly everything from water, e.g. to demineralize it with techniques such as Reverse Osmosis or distillation, then to selectively add back in what you want from a veritable "buffet" of minerals and ions, this is not going to prove to be either cost effective or reasonable for most people.

Very soft water is the one type of water that, if I had it coming in from the tap, I'd consider adding in hardness. This is the situation one faces in much of the coastal Pacific Northwest. And I'm not sure if there wouldn't be some lower maintenance option to just adding back in calcium carbonate, but not having this problem myself I haven't studied it. If on the other hand your water is very hard and or tastes bad or both, there are simple things that one should try first in order to determine if a simpler, cheaper, lower maintenance solution makes the most sense. These would include cation softening and use of a carbon filter. I would not approach all water problems the same, and would not advocate starting out with RO water and then adding stuff back in, as there is probably a much easier and cheaper solution that will not scale up your machine very much, and produce equivalent results.

ken

If you're in New York City your water probably comes from the Catskills and Hudson Valley reservoirs and will be very similar to what I get from Skaneatles Lake in central NY. Here in Syracuse our Skaneatles water isn't even filtered - just comes straight here from the lake with a tiny bit of chlorination added. I use a Britta to remove the chlorination taste and the water makes terrific espresso. Outside the city much of the water comes from Lake Ontario and it's a different story.

New York State is very varied. North of the Catskills, the Catskills being the catchment area for NYC reservoirs, the water is hard and calcium deposits have almost ruined most of my plumbing fixtures. A whole house water softener corrected my problem and my espresso doesn't seem the worse for it.

Marvin

Ken Fox wrote:Although it is certainly feasible to remove nearly everything from water, e.g. to demineralize it with techniques such as Reverse Osmosis or distillation, then to selectively add back in what you want from a veritable "buffet" of minerals and ions, this is not going to prove to be either cost effective or reasonable for most people.
ken

Ken this is exactly what I have been doing. Seven months ago we moved to an area with well water which is very hard. I have a water softener for the house but didn't want to use either that or the unsoftened water for espresso. I had an RO system installed for drinking water. I use the RO water and add a product made by Cirqua (two small vials added to 1 gallon of water). I bought the product directly from Cirqua for $1.79 per packet, but here is a site selling it for about $1.10. (http://www.chinamist.com/ct/store/ct_vi...roduct=355)
I think this is pretty reasonably priced.
Rob

rbh1515 wrote:Ken this is exactly what I have been doing. Seven months ago we moved to an area with well water which is very hard. I have a water softener for the house but didn't want to use either that or the unsoftened water for espresso. I had an RO system installed for drinking water. I use the RO water and add a product made by Cirqua (two small vials added to 1 gallon of water). I bought the product directly from Cirqua for $1.79 per packet, but here is a site selling it for about $1.10. (http://www.chinamist.com/ct/store/ct_vi...roduct=355)
I think this is pretty reasonably priced.
Rob

Rob,

And this may well work for you. I'm not going to even attempt to tell people what they should do with their water. The fact that you feel that this works for you does not mean that myriad other approaches might not also work just as well.

For one thing, if you used a cation softener you would probably not ever or hardly ever, need to use a descaler in your machine. Perhaps this is something of no importance to you, so it won't matter either way.

I'm not trying to tell people what is best for their own use, but rather that they should consider all options and not just dismiss a very good option because it is "easy" or they think based upon what they have read that doing so will produce substandard results. A lot of what has been written on this subject would not stand up to even the most basic scientific scrutiny.

ken