How to Make Your Own Coffee Brewing Water?
Have you seen people using their own coffee brewing water in coffee competitions? Have you wondered how to make your own brewing water? It's pretty easy and affordable to make your own coffee brewing water. Let's see how easy it is to make your own coffee brewing water!
Why to make your own brewing water?
As we know, filter coffee is 98,5% water and 1,5% coffee so it's really crucial what kind of water are you using to brew your coffee. Water hardness play a big role how your coffee is extracting; basically the softer water you have, the better extractions you will get. Also your water can be too soft what would lead to sour and winegary cups. To problem around the world is most often that the tap water is too hard. Too hard water will lead to over extracted, empty and dull flavours in the cup which no one definitely want.
I won't go too deep into water hardness and alkalinity because for that you should definitely check out Karkki's blog about water for coffee.
How to make your own brewing water?
To make your own brewing water you will only need three ingredients;
- Deionised / Distilled water
- MgSO4, Magnesium Sulfate - Epsom salts
- NaHCO3, Sodium Bicarbonate - Baking soda (not powder!!)
All of these things are easily available in supermarkets, pharmacies, special stores etc.
You will also need a scale (accurate to 0,1g) and a few bottles or containers.
We will start by making two concentrates:
Buffer concentrate
Dissolve 1,7 g (1,68 g to be exact) of baking soda to 1 litre of distilled water.
Hardness concentrate
Dissolve 2,5 g (2,45 g to be exact) of Epsom salts to 1 litre of distilled water.
The brewing water
Now that you have the concentrates, we will make the brewing water. You will have quite a lot of left over from the concentrates so you are able to make more than 10 litres of brewing water with the concentrates.
The recipes for the brewing water:
- 877 g distilled water
- 82 g buffer concentrate
- 41 g hardness concentrate
This recipe will yield you brewing water with total hardness of 82 ppm and total alkalinity of 41 ppm. I used this recipe in Finnish Brewers Cup 2020 competition and it worked out well.
If you want to play around more with different recipes, make sure to check out Barista Hustle's DIY Water Recipes Redux.
