Spent eleven months blaming my grinder. It was the water.
I moved flat in January and my coffee got worse overnight. Same beans, same grinder, same recipe, same everything. It all tasted like it had been sitting out for an hour.
So I did what everyone does. Ground finer. Then coarser. Bought a new burr set with money I did not have. Changed the ratio, changed the temperature, blamed the roaster and switched twice. Eleven months of this.
Last month a friend turned up with a bottle of supermarket water as a joke, because I would not shut up about it. Brewed the same beans with it. Completely different coffee. Bright, sweet, actually tasted like the fruit written on the bag.
My tap water here is very hard and very alkaline. The alkalinity was flattening every acid in the cup, which is the exact part that makes coffee taste like something rather than just brown.
Eleven months. The bottle cost 40p.
@mkt_9 · 2w ago · 5 replies
Alkalinity and hardness are two different things and this is where most people get stuck, because in tap water they usually turn up together.
Hardness is calcium and magnesium, and you want some of it. It is what carries flavour out of the grounds. Alkalinity is carbonate, and it buffers acid. A cup can be perfectly extracted and still taste dead because the carbonate neutralised the acidity on the way out.
That is why "my coffee is flat" almost never responds to grinding finer. You are not under extracting. The acid is being cancelled after the fact.
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@hexagonal_wrench · 2w ago · 2 replies
Bit of a nitpick but softened water is not the same as low alkalinity either. Ours goes through a softener and it is still hopeless.
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@mkt_9 · 2w ago
Not a nitpick, that is the exact trap. A standard softener swaps calcium for sodium and leaves the carbonate completely untouched. So you lose the useful half and keep the harmful half. Softened water is usually worse for coffee than the hard water going into it.
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@pnwdrizzle · 2w ago · 2 replies
So what do I actually buy. Is there a number on the bottle I should be looking at
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@mkt_9 · 2w ago
Look for bicarbonate on the label rather than just "mineral content". Under about 50mg/l is a sensible starting point. Most of the very cheap still waters are fine. The expensive ones are often the worst, because high mineral content is a selling point when you are drinking it.
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