Hey friends! Make sure you like, comment and share this video! I think this has really important information with a leading coffee scientist so let's make sure it stays relevant! Thanks and cheers
Hi Lance! Love your latte art videos -- they taught me what a real world class could not! About water... If I can't taste a material difference between "good" water (I've tried third wave water) and my tap water, is it still possible that I will taste the difference in pourovers made with these two?
Made a massive difference when I started mixing up my own water from distilled water. I live in Denver and the water is pretty hard. It wasn't a big leap for me since I've had to pay attention to water chemistry for beer brewing and hydroponic gardening before; it just makes sense
Hey, fellow Coloraden here! Good to see Denver being represented! Definitely going to have to test this and see. No way I'm using Denver tap water so I might be missing something using filtered water
Did you experiment with any bottles water that got close? I'm in Denver, have hard water, and I can't get lighter roasts work taste good. It would be great to find a bottle I can experiment with rather than jumping into trying to mix my home from the start.
@@joker927I have not, but I have mixed distilled water in with tap water to try to lower the overall TDS and that has worked alright but not the most reproducible operating procedure lol. If you don't wanna have to deal with measuring and mixing you can pick up some Third Wave Water packets at any Corvus location (I'm certain other specialty coffee roasters will have them for sale, too). Just dump a packet into a gallon of distilled water from King Soopers and you're set🤙
Great interview with Dr Smrke! Very informative. I have been brewing between 15 and 21 TDS based on the recommendation of my espresso machines. But I use just my tap water added to water run through a Zero water filter. Perhaps I will do some testing on my own to see if mineral additives improve the cup. ☕☕😁
Coming from home brewing, it has seemed crazy how far behind coffee is when it comes to to water chemistry. Seems like decades to me. Hope to see the day soon that people will be sharing their water profiles and targets.
In the UK there’s a company you can send a sample of your tap water to and they’ll analyse the mineral content so you can adjust it accordingly for home-brewing. Might eventually take off for coffee too
@@jump25ontoast in most first world countries water companies are required to make water composition data publicly available so having your water tested is not needed.
@@tommihommi1 I live in a super soft water area. I have mentioned it to my wife in the past and she wasn't super keen on the environmental impact when, frankly, our coffee is still delicious!
Loving this series of videos! I have just started to explore the water aspect of coffee brewing. Can’t wait to get my hands on some Lotus Water products so I can tinker with it more.
So enlighting! Thanks Lance and Samuel for deeply discuss the biggest factor of our coffee (after the coffee itself ofc). So far I just create my water based on BH reference, without knowing deeply the effect of each solution. I hope you can elaborate in the future about effect of magnesium and calcium in hardness.
Haven’t tried distilled with replacement. Even before I got super into coffee and was just doing French press though, I found using brita filtered water made a massive difference to taste. Obviously brita leaves behind plenty of dissolved solids but where I live the water is crazy hard so the brita takes it down to a more normal level and yields much much better results. May get some ph test strips and see if there’s a marked difference between brita and tap coffee for me. I already had the brita cuz my tap has off tastes to me just as water anyway, but I wonder how much of the taste difference is those same off tastes I dislike in the plain water versus buffering impacting the acidity
Lance, when will we get a video on the use of your water additives? I've been using distilled + Third Wave Water packets for pour overs, but would like to try your product.
Can't wait to try my lotus water. Currently I use distilled pure water 4L with a measure of "perfect coffee water mineral". I got better result using them with my filter coffee then with the "third wave water". Can't wait to try the lotus recipe.
I'm new to coffee science, but I'm a little surprised how little is known by now. In the beer brewing industry, water chemistry is crucial. Perhaps that's the answer-extraction of sugars and flavors depends enormously on pH and residual alkalinity (primarily because the enzymes require it), wheras it sounds like in coffee brewing it's perhaps a secondary effect. Would love to learn/read more about the acidity-dependent complexes that change extraction yield, and *especially* if there is a way with pH to enhance the fast-extracting coffee flavor components preferentially over the slower ones (which people blame for immersion vs percolation taste profile differences, e.g.).
At 3:42. The pH scale is Acidic to Basic, not Alkaline. Also, a buffer doesn't necessarily "neutralize" an acid. If that were the case the pH would always be 7, the neutrality point.
I think I am lucky that I have soft (but very tasty to me) tap water with only a small amount of carbonates, 28mg CaCO3/l. The magnesium level is low, only 1 mg/l, so maybe I should try adding some. As a chemistry graduate this stuff is fascinating and there are obviously a lot of unknowns to explore.
Very insightful. Never understood what buffer meant before this video. Now I need to eventually look at upgrading my Brita to ZeroWater+buffer+minerals I think. It never ends lol...
My well water is quite soft and has a PH of 9.4. It also has high alkalinity. If I add an acid to bring the water down to neutral the water will revert back to 9.4 within 12 hours. In your opinion would I get a more flavorful cup if I dropped the PH to 7 before brewing?
Hi Lance, what is your preferred water recipe at this time (pending the release of Lotus)? I have been use the original Barista Hustle recipe but am thinking about experimenting some more. Thanks!
So this really dispelled what I thought re: lighter roast = more acidity, darker roast = less acidity. I have a friend who loves Bonsoy. He prefers my dark roast (I';m a roaster) and part of that is because the Bonsoy splits less in the dark roast compared to my medium roast. I understood that it was acidity that caused the splitting, but perhaps it is some other factor. I do also note the bicarb-Bonsoy trick which as I understand is a base and essentially a buffer - so I guess I'm confused as to what this means.
8:17 This seems like a pretty huge finding. The general consensus that I've seen on the internet was that the minerals in the water were important because they helped extract the coffee solubles. But this experiment has shown that idea to be false. Very interesting.
Wow, very interesting. I was surprised to hear that you could brew with distilled water and then add minerals to get the same effect. I had assumed that water composition was important for extraction, rather than for perception of flavor. Thanks for the explainer.
Keep in mind that the study only looked at the chemical composition. Perception of flavour was not investigated. James has a video on a similar topic here, where he adds bicarbonate to espresso to buffer acidity: th-cam.com/video/jtCbIbi2dHI/w-d-xo.html
So, that means we can brew coffee with distilled water and then use something like the lotus to try different combinations of minerals and see how they affect flavor, right?
So the Buffer is the Total Alkalinity of the water, which acts as a stabilizer for the PH of the water. So if your buffer is too high or too low it can pull/mute/cancel out the acidity of the coffee? is that right? If only someone had a simple solution for this... It makes sense when I am dealing with my pool, but for coffee it's a big more confusing...
I think I really should test my water just to see. I bet it's going to be significant. Question: Can you do a video on why some coffee seems to not make good espresso, which to me seems to be high density beans. I like to try different things when I find them but I still have a hard time knowing when it will or won't make good espresso, even when I think I've dialed it in as best I can. I like a good filter brew, this is just something I don't understand.
Thing is not all coffees will ever be acceptable/tolerable for espresso. Depending on origin, altitude, processing method, etc. some just won't be suitable regardless of changes made. It's up to you to do trial/error to find your favorites and go from there. Forget any lame 'scientific' explanations as that never matches real world experience.
Good stuff… nerdy stuff, but great. Keep spreading the knowledge. It’s surprising difficult to get excellent drinking water when you live in a metropolitan area. I mostly drink RO water (reverses osmosis filtered) at home, because it’s a good way to remove all the toxic stuff that the city adds to it, but RO is also bad because it removes all the good stuff. I need to get minerals somewhere else in your diet. I’ve tried to remineralize my drinking water different ways but actually got headaches from doing that. We need people to study this more - for great coffee, but also just for great drinking water.
Samo lives in Zurich. I did what I could when running into him in Milan. I explained as much in the caption. I'm about a 3.5 hr flight away so doubtful on the request.
Hey Lance I have a question for my job. If we use a gallon jug of purified water what minerals should we add to the jug to help the espresso flavor profile and how much? It will be a huge help thank you
I would guess, those that aren't present in the coffee itself which it supposedly contains plenty of different ones, depending on origin (with pot. excess). Maybe go for silicon and some trace elements?
Things like Third Wave Water are nice but not accessible at large scale due to the cost imo. I wish someone would make water with good coffee chemistry in those jugs you can buy for coolers. They could sell with different recipes depending on what coffee you are drinking that month.
you can do this at home for VERY cheap. Buy distilled water and packets for the composition you want, assuming you already have a scale at home for coffee that's all you need, and per volume is going to be cheaper than third wave water or whatever other marketing thing that's just basic chemistry.
Thank you for this informative vid! I was literally just speaking with a fellow colleague about water composition and how it affects extraction across various coffees, roasters and roast profiles. As well as curating water mineral composition specific to these individual subjects. I also was wondering what espresso grinder was used in your video. Thanks again!
Just realised an implication from the start of the video and differences in dilution between filter and espresso, if you want the same buffering and flavour outcomes from espresso as filter when it comes to adjusting minerals you would have to use roughly 5 times as much
Not sure if it’s been answered below, how would this affect in the creation of cold brew? You both mention filter coffee and espresso but how about cold brew?
Thanks Lance. I've got a question, does every acidic component in coffee tastes sour? I can't tolerate sourness in coffee yet like the feeling of freshness it provides. Is there any way around it?
Unpleasant sourness is usually a sign of under extraction. I thought I hated acidity in coffee until I discovered that was just poor extraction/technique. I changed my techniques and now love light roasted coffee!
Massive. Third wave is a static recipe. Lotus is open ended. You can recreate something like third wave or can do an innumerable amount of other recipes. There is no limit to the flexibility. Excited for you to get it!
@@LanceHedrick Lotus Water solutions are several Chloride Salts. That's a great way to mask defects in roasting and extraction; as well as potentially destroying your brewing equipment in the process.
![30 ชั่วโมงคนเดียว บนรถไฟชั้น 3 โซเวียต [Around The World Ep. 2]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/MlE9boAVqDA/mqdefault.jpg)
Hey friends! Make sure you like, comment and share this video! I think this has really important information with a leading coffee scientist so let's make sure it stays relevant! Thanks and cheers
Hi Lance! Love your latte art videos -- they taught me what a real world class could not!
About water... If I can't taste a material difference between "good" water (I've tried third wave water) and my tap water, is it still possible that I will taste the difference in pourovers made with these two?
Now I'm curious to try alkaline water to brew some coffee to see what the taste change is.
Made a massive difference when I started mixing up my own water from distilled water. I live in Denver and the water is pretty hard. It wasn't a big leap for me since I've had to pay attention to water chemistry for beer brewing and hydroponic gardening before; it just makes sense
Hey, fellow Coloraden here! Good to see Denver being represented! Definitely going to have to test this and see. No way I'm using Denver tap water so I might be missing something using filtered water
Did you experiment with any bottles water that got close? I'm in Denver, have hard water, and I can't get lighter roasts work taste good. It would be great to find a bottle I can experiment with rather than jumping into trying to mix my home from the start.
@@joker927I have not, but I have mixed distilled water in with tap water to try to lower the overall TDS and that has worked alright but not the most reproducible operating procedure lol.
If you don't wanna have to deal with measuring and mixing you can pick up some Third Wave Water packets at any Corvus location (I'm certain other specialty coffee roasters will have them for sale, too). Just dump a packet into a gallon of distilled water from King Soopers and you're set🤙
@@dmdrosselmeyer wow. That's a great idea. Thanks for a great response. And to a year old comment too. Cheers.
Great interview with Dr Smrke! Very informative. I have been brewing between 15 and 21 TDS based on the recommendation of my espresso machines. But I use just my tap water added to water run through a Zero water filter. Perhaps I will do some testing on my own to see if mineral additives improve the cup. ☕☕😁
Coming from home brewing, it has seemed crazy how far behind coffee is when it comes to to water chemistry.
Seems like decades to me.
Hope to see the day soon that people will be sharing their water profiles and targets.
Yes! That is a big reason I started lotus with Nick Chapman. Hoping to get all of that very public soon
@@LanceHedrick will be exciting for sure.
Would be a big step to see people stop starting from RO/Deionized water and mixing good water from the tap.
In the UK there’s a company you can send a sample of your tap water to and they’ll analyse the mineral content so you can adjust it accordingly for home-brewing. Might eventually take off for coffee too
@@jump25ontoast in most first world countries water companies are required to make water composition data publicly available so having your water tested is not needed.
This answered a couple questions but created so many more, but in a good interesting rabbit hole kind of way! Thanks Lance!
Sheep shearing herd roundup kind of way, and by the way, copper sulfate wasn't mentioned
I've contemplating getting distilled water and adding in minerals. Primarily to reduce limescale in the machine. I need to look at costs and effort.
Thank you Lance for being the euro knowledge and breaking it down to the West.
Probably the biggest area of coffee prep at home I just can't bring myself to get into (mainly cos my coffee is still tasty/my wife would kill me)
If happy with your coffee, that is great! But this will definitely make it even better!
Zero water filter is pretty painless!
@@tommihommi1 yeah. If you are using ro water at home just mix with that and you will still get some awesome results.
Water chemistry is so easy.
@@tommihommi1 I live in a super soft water area. I have mentioned it to my wife in the past and she wasn't super keen on the environmental impact when, frankly, our coffee is still delicious!
Loving this series of videos! I have just started to explore the water aspect of coffee brewing. Can’t wait to get my hands on some Lotus Water products so I can tinker with it more.
Thank you for the in depth videos Lance!
So enlighting! Thanks Lance and Samuel for deeply discuss the biggest factor of our coffee (after the coffee itself ofc). So far I just create my water based on BH reference, without knowing deeply the effect of each solution.
I hope you can elaborate in the future about effect of magnesium and calcium in hardness.
Can’t wait to receive my water for coffee kit, hopefully soon!
Haven’t tried distilled with replacement. Even before I got super into coffee and was just doing French press though, I found using brita filtered water made a massive difference to taste. Obviously brita leaves behind plenty of dissolved solids but where I live the water is crazy hard so the brita takes it down to a more normal level and yields much much better results. May get some ph test strips and see if there’s a marked difference between brita and tap coffee for me. I already had the brita cuz my tap has off tastes to me just as water anyway, but I wonder how much of the taste difference is those same off tastes I dislike in the plain water versus buffering impacting the acidity
Absolutely fantastic video- very insightful!
Lance, when will we get a video on the use of your water additives? I've been using distilled + Third Wave Water packets for pour overs, but would like to try your product.
Been doing the 3rd wave packets for over a year now but need to start mixing my own minerals
Can't wait to try my lotus water. Currently I use distilled pure water 4L with a measure of "perfect coffee water mineral". I got better result using them with my filter coffee then with the "third wave water".
Can't wait to try the lotus recipe.
I'm new to coffee science, but I'm a little surprised how little is known by now. In the beer brewing industry, water chemistry is crucial. Perhaps that's the answer-extraction of sugars and flavors depends enormously on pH and residual alkalinity (primarily because the enzymes require it), wheras it sounds like in coffee brewing it's perhaps a secondary effect. Would love to learn/read more about the acidity-dependent complexes that change extraction yield, and *especially* if there is a way with pH to enhance the fast-extracting coffee flavor components preferentially over the slower ones (which people blame for immersion vs percolation taste profile differences, e.g.).
This is nothing new. I've known about water quality and it's affect on coffee for years, it's just that YOU are now hearing about it.
@@bgm1911 neat - anything you can share on preferential flavor compound extraction or extraction yield dependence?
At 3:42. The pH scale is Acidic to Basic, not Alkaline. Also, a buffer doesn't necessarily "neutralize" an acid. If that were the case the pH would always be 7, the neutrality point.
I think I am lucky that I have soft (but very tasty to me) tap water with only a small amount of carbonates, 28mg CaCO3/l. The magnesium level is low, only 1 mg/l, so maybe I should try adding some. As a chemistry graduate this stuff is fascinating and there are obviously a lot of unknowns to explore.
Very insightful. Never understood what buffer meant before this video. Now I need to eventually look at upgrading my Brita to ZeroWater+buffer+minerals I think. It never ends lol...
Quality info 💪🏼💪🏼
Thanks for watching!
My well water is quite soft and has a PH of 9.4. It also has high alkalinity. If I add an acid to bring the water down to neutral the water will revert back to 9.4 within 12 hours. In your opinion would I get a more flavorful cup if I dropped the PH to 7 before brewing?
This is the science in coffee I'm looking for.
Hi Lance, what is your preferred water recipe at this time (pending the release of Lotus)? I have been use the original Barista Hustle recipe but am thinking about experimenting some more. Thanks!
So this really dispelled what I thought re: lighter roast = more acidity, darker roast = less acidity. I have a friend who loves Bonsoy. He prefers my dark roast (I';m a roaster) and part of that is because the Bonsoy splits less in the dark roast compared to my medium roast. I understood that it was acidity that caused the splitting, but perhaps it is some other factor. I do also note the bicarb-Bonsoy trick which as I understand is a base and essentially a buffer - so I guess I'm confused as to what this means.
Really hoping this video is about love ❤️
It absolutely is. Fundamental ingredient to love is water.
8:17 This seems like a pretty huge finding. The general consensus that I've seen on the internet was that the minerals in the water were important because they helped extract the coffee solubles. But this experiment has shown that idea to be false. Very interesting.
Wow, very interesting. I was surprised to hear that you could brew with distilled water and then add minerals to get the same effect. I had assumed that water composition was important for extraction, rather than for perception of flavor. Thanks for the explainer.
Keep in mind that the study only looked at the chemical composition. Perception of flavour was not investigated.
James has a video on a similar topic here, where he adds bicarbonate to espresso to buffer acidity:
th-cam.com/video/jtCbIbi2dHI/w-d-xo.html
I would like to see an experiment where minerals were added to brewed coffee to make it taste better.
So, that means we can brew coffee with distilled water and then use something like the lotus to try different combinations of minerals and see how they affect flavor, right?
So the Buffer is the Total Alkalinity of the water, which acts as a stabilizer for the PH of the water. So if your buffer is too high or too low it can pull/mute/cancel out the acidity of the coffee? is that right? If only someone had a simple solution for this...
It makes sense when I am dealing with my pool, but for coffee it's a big more confusing...
This is so helpful!
I think I really should test my water just to see. I bet it's going to be significant. Question: Can you do a video on why some coffee seems to not make good espresso, which to me seems to be high density beans. I like to try different things when I find them but I still have a hard time knowing when it will or won't make good espresso, even when I think I've dialed it in as best I can. I like a good filter brew, this is just something I don't understand.
Thing is not all coffees will ever be acceptable/tolerable for espresso. Depending on origin, altitude, processing method, etc. some just won't be suitable regardless of changes made. It's up to you to do trial/error to find your favorites and go from there. Forget any lame 'scientific' explanations as that never matches real world experience.
Good stuff… nerdy stuff, but great. Keep spreading the knowledge. It’s surprising difficult to get excellent drinking water when you live in a metropolitan area. I mostly drink RO water (reverses osmosis filtered) at home, because it’s a good way to remove all the toxic stuff that the city adds to it, but RO is also bad because it removes all the good stuff. I need to get minerals somewhere else in your diet. I’ve tried to remineralize my drinking water different ways but actually got headaches from doing that. We need people to study this more - for great coffee, but also just for great drinking water.
Amazing video.
I wish the audio was better especially for Sam.
Hope to see sam in a video recorded in your studio.
Samo lives in Zurich. I did what I could when running into him in Milan. I explained as much in the caption.
I'm about a 3.5 hr flight away so doubtful on the request.
@@LanceHedrick makes sense. Anyways I have to watch video a couple of times to digest all that information. Thanks for these kind of videos
Thanks Lance.
Thank you!
oh... fock ya.. been waiting for a new vid bud! thanks!
Hope you enjoy!
Hey Lance I have a question for my job. If we use a gallon jug of purified water what minerals should we add to the jug to help the espresso flavor profile and how much? It will be a huge help thank you
I would guess, those that aren't present in the coffee itself which it supposedly contains plenty of different ones, depending on origin (with pot. excess). Maybe go for silicon and some trace elements?
Things like Third Wave Water are nice but not accessible at large scale due to the cost imo. I wish someone would make water with good coffee chemistry in those jugs you can buy for coolers. They could sell with different recipes depending on what coffee you are drinking that month.
you can do this at home for VERY cheap. Buy distilled water and packets for the composition you want, assuming you already have a scale at home for coffee that's all you need, and per volume is going to be cheaper than third wave water or whatever other marketing thing that's just basic chemistry.
Thank you for this informative vid! I was literally just speaking with a fellow colleague about water composition and how it affects extraction across various coffees, roasters and roast profiles. As well as curating water mineral composition specific to these individual subjects. I also was wondering what espresso grinder was used in your video. Thanks again!
The grinder is the Bentwood Vertical 63. Lance did an excellent review here:
th-cam.com/video/6ASn0sxSWok/w-d-xo.html
🤔 I wonder what tris buffer tastes like
Just realised an implication from the start of the video and differences in dilution between filter and espresso, if you want the same buffering and flavour outcomes from espresso as filter when it comes to adjusting minerals you would have to use roughly 5 times as much
Lance do you know if Lotus Water is still accepting backers? Would love to try it out!
Ok. Tbh confused. What is the recommendation for home brewers?
Controlling your water parameters as it has the greatest impact on taste
Not sure if it’s been answered below, how would this affect in the creation of cold brew? You both mention filter coffee and espresso but how about cold brew?
Cold brew is under the category filter Coffee
Thanks Lance. I've got a question, does every acidic component in coffee tastes sour? I can't tolerate sourness in coffee yet like the feeling of freshness it provides. Is there any way around it?
Unpleasant sourness is usually a sign of under extraction. I thought I hated acidity in coffee until I discovered that was just poor extraction/technique. I changed my techniques and now love light roasted coffee!
@@TheEraser92 I'm grateful for your answer. Hopefully it'll work for me as well 😊
how are you, hi super fan hehe, where can i get those little bottles with water solutions, lotus, i guess right?
Waiting for my Lotus Water delivery. Currently using Third Wave in RO water. Curious of what the difference will be.
Massive. Third wave is a static recipe. Lotus is open ended. You can recreate something like third wave or can do an innumerable amount of other recipes. There is no limit to the flexibility. Excited for you to get it!
@@LanceHedrick Lotus Water solutions are several Chloride Salts. That's a great way to mask defects in roasting and extraction; as well as potentially destroying your brewing equipment in the process.
How is life in Portugal Buddy?
It's fantastic! Loving it
@@LanceHedrick *AWESOME!* 🏝 😎
Lance, if you could just improve the audio quality 😭
just install an inline multi stage water purifier under your sink
I use distilled water with perfect coffee water mix. Anyone know if that’s the best one?
Not about what is best overall but what works best for your coffee and taste preferences.
I wish someone would make easy to use coffee minerals, so crafting water for coffee would be accessible to the masses....🤔
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Thank you!
Or just move to Oslo and brew Tim Wendelboe’s coffee with Tim Wendelboe’s tap water
Would be cool to see some subtitles
Click on closed captioning! They're there
@@LanceHedrick Afraid I’m only getting the auto generated ones at the moment but I’ll check back in a bit! Thanks :)