kozikow blog

@kozikow

Introduction

Water is often overlooked aspect of coffee brewing with often more impact than squeezing last 1% extraction from your prep routine. Good water not only will make coffee taste better, but it will reduce scale buildup, especially important with Gaggia Classic Pro alumnium boilers. 

You might be winner of tap lottery and your water is already perfect. For most people it’s bad. The best way is to start by evaluating your water. Generally recommended way is to go for aquarium testing kits, as those will offer the most bang for the buck.

Based on your testing results you would keep your tap water as it is, implement additional testing or go for custom water recipe like Third Wave Water or your own cheaper recipe.

Testing kits

Often recommended kit in the USA is “API test kit” – e.g. https://apifishcare.com/product/gh-kh-test-kit . I didn’t find those for sale in Poland.

I ordered those two:

Current solution

This is what I currently have prior to doing any tests: 

Gold standard

Coffeedesk at Wilcza in Warsaw allows customers to get water with customer tap if you buy their coffee. They run reverse osmosis first and add two types of minerals. I will assume this is my “gold standard” I will be comparing water testing kits to.

Although I have a dedicated jug for water raids, it feels awkward to do it long term.

Primavera water

The rumors are “Primavera” water (brand of grocery store water in Poland) have good parameters for coffee. It’s quite cheap and widely available:

Test results 

Conclusion

I was hoping some of the filtered solutions or Primavera would come pretty close to “mineral sachets”. Sadly it seems pretty far on couple parameters. Kh, ph and gh came slightly above of acceptable limit for all solutions.

Coffeedesk I have been sourcing my water from has great article on acceptable levels for coffee: https://b2b.coffeedesk.com/blog/2019/12/23/water-the-main-ingredient-of-coffee-part-1/ .

GH: 50–110 ppm
KH 40–70 ppm
pH: 6.5–7.5
TDS: 100–170 ppm

I settled for third wave water added to distilled water for now. I am making it at home to not do water raids. I couldn’t find online in Poland Third Wave water, so I ordered it from Germany: https://www.leuchtfeuer.coffee/en-in/products/third-wave-water-espresso-profile . For distilled water I decided to use https://allegro.pl/oferta/woda-destylowana-czysta-do-analiz-2l-8755809320 . Overall it comes not too expensive – ~6PLN per litre.

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