Is your water secretly ruining your coffee?

Are you truly satisfied with your morning coffee? ☕ In this foundational episode of our three-part series on water, we dive deep into how a hidden factor—your home's water hardness—could be secretly ruining your coffee. We explore the difference between  hard water and soft water and how the minerals dissolved in your tap water impact everything from soap lathering to the scale buildup in your expensive coffee machine. Learn a simple, no-cost DIY water test you can do in 30 seconds with basic liquid dish soap to diagnose your home water. We also share advanced methods for getting a precise measurement of your total dissolved solids (TDS), and a simple hack to clean your coffee machine using vinegar. This episode is the first real step to brewing a better cup of coffee by understanding what’s coming out of your tap!

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5 Takeaways

1. Your water's hardness, which is the amount of dissolved minerals like calcium and magnesium, is a significant factor in the taste of your coffee.
2. A simple shower test can help you identify your water type: lots of soap for lathering indicates hard water, while a slippery, slick feeling after rinsing is a sign of soft water.
3. You can easily perform a free at-home dish soap test by shaking a bottle of your tap water with a few drops of liquid soap. Hard water will result in few bubbles and cloudy water, while soft water will produce a thick foam.
4. The same minerals in hard water that react with soap are also responsible for the scale buildup, or chalky white deposits, in your kettle and coffee machine.
5. To clean out existing scale buildup, you can run a mix of equal parts white vinegar and water through your machine, letting it sit for 30-60 minutes mid-cycle before finishing and rinsing with clean water.

3 Questions

1. What does your shower test reveal about your water? Is it a bubbly lather or a slippery rinse?
2. Where do you live, and does your region's geology align with the hard or soft water examples we mentioned?
3. If you performed the dish soap test, what were your results? Were you surprised by the outcome?

Glossary

• Hard Water: Water with a high concentration of dissolved minerals, specifically calcium and magnesium.
• Soft Water: Water with a very low concentration of dissolved minerals.
• Scale: The hard, chalky, white mineral deposits (primarily calcium carbonate) that are left behind when hard water is heated.
• Chlorine: A chemical used in water treatment that can add an "off" or swimming-pool taste to tap water.
• Bicarbonates: A type of mineral salt found in water that acts as a buffer, helping to balance the acidity of coffee, which significantly impacts the final taste.
• pH: A measure of how acidic or alkaline water is on a scale from 0 to 14. For coffee, the ideal is a neutral pH of 7.
• Total Dissolved Solids (TDS): The total measurement of all minerals, salts, and other substances dissolved in a volume of water, often expressed in Parts Per Million (PPM)