Modified RPavlis recipe for both espresso and pourover?

#1: Post by **boren** » May 31st, 2023, 5:08 pm

RPavlis is very popular for espresso but is considered too soft for pourover. In the last few months I started adding a bit of hardness (epsom salt) aiming to improve it for pourover while still keeping it safe for use in my espresso machine. I can't say I notice a huge difference, but I haven't done side-by-side cupping with straight RPavlis water.

What I do is add 40 ml of Potassium bicarbonate concentrate (5 gram to 500 ml) + 40 ml of epsom salt concentrate (7.5 gram to 500 ml) into 4.3 liter of RO water. I get PH of about 6.5 and hardness of about 40 PPM.

Does this recipe make sense? Any recommended tweaks given these measurements and the ingredients I have on hand?

#2: Post by **Jeff** » May 31st, 2023, 5:31 pm

A lot will depend on the beans. For the lights and ultralights we drink here, "Holy Water" seems to work well. 62/23 GH/KH That and more at https://espressoaf.com/guides/water.html

(The same coffees as espresso with 98 HUs, Bentwood, and similar do well with high buffer, such as 20/80)

May 31st, 2023, 5:47 pm

Thanks for sharing this article, it's exactly what I was looking for! It seems all I need to do to bless my water as holy is half the amount of Potassium bicarbonate. I'm definitely going to try this soon.

May 31st, 2023, 6:51 pm

Based on the spreadsheet linked from the article and my preference to use concentrates I ended up with this table:

In bold are recipes that originally use Potassium bicarbonate rather than baking soda.

I also updated the epsom salt concentrate to use the same ratio as the Potassium bicarbonate concentrate, 5 gram to 500 ml in both.