As you probably know, I live in Munich, where tap water is though drinkable (and actually very delicious, thanks, Königssee), but very very hard, e.g. has high mineral content, mostly calcium and magnesium. While those are very healthy and absolutely fine for cold drinking water, they start creating all sorts of problems the moment you try to heat water up for hot beverages. They are equally harmful for any appliances that use tap water - yes, like that gorgeous and expensive espresso machine I’ve been talking about in one of the older posts, for example. If you never heard about hard water being harmful, but wondered how you can make your coffee taste better here is a The Science of Coffee Podcast Episode that explains it in a very digestable way (in my opinion). For more advanced coffee connoisseurs among you, here is a useful FAQ on water science from Barista Hustle. If you are still not convinced water is important for making the most of specialty grade coffee, here is a link to SCA Coffee Standards. After doing some research, I figured out the easiest way to have suitable coffee brewing water at home is to mix distilled water with some ready solution for specialty coffee. There are a number of companies who offer such solutions, I chose Third Wave Coffee to start with, partially because you can buy their products in Europe. Another popular ready solution is GC Water, I couldn’t find a way to buy it in Europe though, maybe you are more lucky. I buy Classic Profile for filter brews and Espresso Profile for my Espresso Machine.

As I mentioned earlier, how home made brewing water works is you mix a mineral solution with distilled water, water with 0 TDS (total dissolved solids) in it. You can usually get distilled water in a local hardware store. In my case, I am lucky to have a partner who is into reef aquarium hobby, so distilled water production is part of our monthly routine anyways. If you wonder how it looks like, here is a video of how our bathroom looks like on an average water production day:

So yes, I have access to unlimited distilled water. The final step would be to mix one of the Third Wave Water sticks with distilled water and voila - I have perfect specialty grade brewing water! But there still was a small caveat: how do I mix the water with the solution in the right proportion and make sure I have some ready-to-go water available whenever I want a cup of delicious coffee? As you have maybe noticed the instructions on the package say “1 stick per 1 gallon of distilled water”. I’m not good with impreial system of units and didn’t look forward to converting, measuring and using the sticks partially. So my solution was to buy a bottle of water holding exactly a gallon, which turned out to be not such an easy task in Europe. After an hour of search on Amazon, I found this nice bottle here from Covacure with a practical handle for a good grip when mixing solution with water. So I have two (with some coffee-themed stickers to differentiate between them) and you saw them on them on the picture above.

I can totally recommend this setup (buying water in a hardware store is perfectly fine too, you don’t have to get into the aquarium reef hobby), the only annoying thing is the price of Third Wave Water at least here in Europe, I get them for ~20 EUR each in a local coffee shop Vits Coffee that distributes them, which is just as much as I would pay online considering shipping costs. There are certainly ways to make this cheaper - there are a lot of recipies to mix yourself by buying minerals in bulk, here is a good resource to look into it. I will probably try some homemade solutions sometime in the future, but right now I don’t feel like I have become an expert enough to taste out different recipies. And yes, it also sounds like a bit of a pain, so I am perfectly happy with my Third Wave Water sticks for now. Hope you learned something useful from this post and happy brewing!