Water: Part II
It’s been great to see so many of you experimenting with different water recipes for your home brewing! If you haven’t taken the plunge yet, check out our complete guide on water for brewing coffee here.
One interesting thing that came up recently in some of our discussions is the question of which individual coffee would be best to use for testing out a bunch of different water recipes.
In general, we’d recommend using a coffee that has a slightly more subtle flavor profile to it. Why? Coffees that are intensely fruity, for example, are going to be pretty darn fruity no matter which water recipe you use (within reason). That’s not to say that they won’t taste different with different waters - they absolutely do! Check out some of our Black Label series offerings to see our cupping notes to see what we mean.
For the most part, using very low alkalinity water will make an intensely fruity coffee taste fruity like an unripe fruit, or be heavily citrus-forward (sour). A higher alkalinity water will tend to make the same coffee taste more like ripe fruit, even jammy fruit or cooked fruits. There is a big difference between these profiles, but it’s still fruity either way.
However, with a coffee that has a little hint of fruit to it, but perhaps also a hint of nuts or chocolate, and some sugar-browning type sweetness rather than fruit sweetness, low alkalinity water will make it taste significantly fruitier, but high alkalinity water will make it taste a lot more chocolate-forward or caramel/toffee-forward. In this case, the two water recipes produce cups that taste like completely different coffees.
That said, the best strategy for testing out different waters is to just test them out with whatever you are currently brewing.
If your normal brew water is super soft/low alkalinity, and you tend to prefer coffees that are a little more developed or roasted darker, you may find that harder or higher alkalinity water actually makes those coffees taste too flat or chalky or bitter for you, and you might decide to try out some lighter roasts. If your normal brew water is pretty hard or higher in alkalinity, and you tend to prefer extremely light roasts, you may find that softer or lower alkalinity water actually makes those coffees taste too sour or vegetal for you, and you might decide to try out some more developed roasts.
What do we do?
We cup all of our coffees using full-strength Third Wave Water, and use the results of our sample roast cuppings and test roast (full-size production batches) cuppings to fine-tune our roast profiles so that our light roast coffees have the best combination of clarity, acidity, juiciness, and sweetness. We aim to tone down the clarity, acidity, and juiciness of our medium roast coffees to really emphasize the sweetness, and with our dark roast coffee we are aiming for something that is truly bittersweet and smoky. Different strokes for different folks!
