Thanks for all of your help

I'd like to try alternatives to Third Wave Water for pour overs with light roast coffees, and can use advice on the best place to begin without getting overly lost into exponentially more variables (seems to be the trend with a coffee hobby )

I'm hoping to try alternatives because I found that when I get light roasts from roasters such as La Cabra, Manhattan, Sey, April, etc, my water seems to be much harder than what they suggest and I have trouble capturing the most out of their coffees. I've heard experts (like Scott Rao) claim TWW is not their favorite, so I'd love to find new approaches and see what I could be missing out on.

A.) Should I begin with Barista Hustle's guide?

- If so, my concern is that they only use two ingredients (Epsom salt and baking soda), and I'm worried I'll be missing key ingredients I've heard others discuss (potassium, calcium)
- also if so, anyone have a suggestion for which recipe is a good starting point for helping with clarity/sweetness/vibrancy of light roasts?

B.) OR, should I try Lotus Coffee Water drops?
- My main concerns here are whether it's very expensive (hard for me to judge) and if it will lead me to too many variables? Though, it does seem like a very simple set of variables with the droplet approach.

Any guidance at all would be extremely helpful! Thanks so much

Elemsee wrote:I've heard experts (like Scott Rao) claim TWW is not their favorite

Are you sure that Scott Rao expressed that opinion? I've not heard him write or say that in posts or podcasts, and I know he recommended TWW as a good choice for folks participating in his Facsimile online cup-along sessions a year or so ago.

Elemsee wrote:A.) Should I begin with Barista Hustle's guide?
B.) OR, should I try Lotus Coffee Water drops?

I think you'd be fine with the Barista Hustle to begin with, and focus on whether you prefer low alkalinity (20 mg/L as CaCO3 or less) over the typical recommended 40-80 mg/L. Then play around with ~90 mg/L hardness vs low (or even zero) hardness to see if you have a taste preference there.

Then perhaps you might want to take it further and experiment with the Lotus drops (calcium chloride and/or magnesium chloride instead of magnesium sulfate for hardness, and potassium bicarbonate and/or sodium bicarbonate for alkalinity). I don't think I would notice consistent differences here but some people appear to have taste preferences between calcium vs magnesium, or between sodium vs potassium.

Elemsee wrote:Thanks for all of your help

I'd like to try alternatives to Third Wave Water for pour overs with light roast coffees, and can use advice on the best place to begin without getting overly lost into exponentially more variables (seems to be the trend with a coffee hobby )

I'm hoping to try alternatives because I found that when I get light roasts from roasters such as La Cabra, Manhattan, Sey, April, etc, my water seems to be much harder than what they suggest and I have trouble capturing the most out of their coffees. I've heard experts (like Scott Rao) claim TWW is not their favorite, so I'd love to find new approaches and see what I could be missing out on.

A.) Should I begin with Barista Hustle's guide?

- If so, my concern is that they only use two ingredients (Epsom salt and baking soda), and I'm worried I'll be missing key ingredients I've heard others discuss (potassium, calcium)
- also if so, anyone have a suggestion for which recipe is a good starting point for helping with clarity/sweetness/vibrancy of light roasts?

B.) OR, should I try Lotus Coffee Water drops?
- My main concerns here are whether it's very expensive (hard for me to judge) and if it will lead me to too many variables? Though, it does seem like a very simple set of variables with the droplet approach.

Any guidance at all would be extremely helpful! Thanks so much

I find water chemistry for brewing endlessly fascinating. I will let others who understand it better weigh in more than I will. For me, I didn't want to continually buy distilled or packaged water for all my coffee. So I start with tap water and the Ca/Mg it contains. For pour-over, higher hardness is somewhat less an issue than with espresso where you also have equipment issues. I'm not saying it is not important just less so. I concentrate on alkalinity which I think is very important. My tap water alkalinity is 112 as CaCO3 so fairly high. What I found is (most will find this obvious) when reducing alkalinity you can't just use your normal dialed in technique for a particular coffee then change alkalinity and see the comparison. You have to re-dial in the brew. I found that as I lowered alkalinity from 112 to 60 as CaCO3 the extraction characteristics changed and the total brew time dropped significantly (I don't really understand why). In general I had to grind finer at lower alkalinity to get a balanced cup and then I could compare results with the higher alkalinity. If I just used my standard dialed in technique for a particular coffee and lowered alkalinity the results were not good. However I enjoyed the dialed in result at the 60 alkalinity very much although the results were only subtlety different and it is subjective. I am next going to try alkalinity around 35. I brew almost entirely light and medium light roasted beans and I'm doing these trials with a Tim Wendelboe coffee. I use a 10% phosphoric acid solution (easily obtainable) to reduce alkalinity. So really all I'm trying to say is that whatever means you take to modify water chemistry, take enough time to re-dial in your technique each time you make changes to get a balanced cup before making any judgement on the results.

I love using the lotus water drops. It's a very simple process and I do a gallon at a time. After some at home testing I've landed on a recipe that's similar to lances light & bright but I swap some of the calcium for magnesium and some of the potassium for sodium.

My recipe is as follows:
4 drops calcium
2 drops magnesium
4 drops potassium
1 drop sodium

Then I scale it up to 1 gallon.

bobR wrote:I found that as I lowered alkalinity from 112 to 60 as CaCO3 the extraction characteristics changed and the total brew time dropped significantly (I don't really understand why).

That effect has been observed for decades and discussed a little in both the old SCAA (2011) and the newer SCA (2018) water quality handbooks. It's hypothesized to be related to the increased CO2 foaming produced by reactions of high bicarbonate with coffee acids.

Here's a quote from the 2018 SCA Water Quality Handbook :

The higher the alkalinity,the lower the perceived acidity. Moreover, for high alkalinity (i.e. >100 ppm CaCO3) the neutralization of acids extracted from coffee by hydrogen carbonate, forms large amounts of carbon dioxide. This can increase extraction time and thereby lead to over extraction (Gardner, 1958; Fond 1995; Navarini and Rivetti 2010).

P.S.

bobR wrote:I find water chemistry for brewing endlessly fascinating.

That SCA handbook is an excellent read for anyone interested in water for coffee brewing. You can get a digital copy at the SCA store: https://sca.coffee/store-index/the-2018 ... y-handbook. They used to also sell hard copy but that may be out of print. You can get some (about 17 pages) of the same information by the same authors in chapter 16 of the Craft and Science of Coffee book: https://www.elsevier.com/books/the-craf ... 2-803520-7. And I highly recommend the bible on the subject: Jim Schulman's Insanely Long Water FAQ. 20 years old but very well researched and written, and still relevant.

homeburrero wrote:That effect has been observed for decades and discussed a little in both the old SCAA (2011) and the newer SCA (2018) water quality handbooks. It's hypothesized to be related to the increased CO2 foaming produced by reactions of high bicarbonate with coffee acids.

Here's a quote from the 2018 SCA Water Quality Handbook :


P.S.
That SCA handbook is an excellent read for anyone interested in water for coffee brewing. You can get a digital copy at the SCA store: https://sca.coffee/store-index/the-2018 ... y-handbook. They used to also sell hard copy but that may be out of print. You can get some (about 17 pages) of the same information by the same authors in chapter 16 of the Craft and Science of Coffee book: https://www.elsevier.com/books/the-craf ... 2-803520-7. And I highly recommend the bible on the subject: Jim Schulman's Insanely Long Water FAQ. 20 years old but very well researched and written, and still relevant.

Thanks for this information!!