I Made My Own Coffee Water. Here's Why.

In this episode, I take you inside one of the most misunderstood variables in specialty coffee: water. I open up about my journey from tap water skeptic to someone actively building my own water chemistry from scratch, and why that evolution was not only inevitable but necessary. I talk about how I stumbled back into Third Wave Water after finding a forgotten package in the back of a shelf, how it immediately changed what I was tasting, and why, after more than a year of using it, I started noticing that every cup was beginning to taste a little too similar. I share what that observation triggered in me, and why 163 PPM felt too heavy for the kind of clarity and sweetness I was chasing.

I also walk through why I decided to move away from pre-packaged water mineral profiles and start building my own, using a target of around 100 PPM and a philosophy organized around two profiles: sweetness and acidity. Rather than matching water to roast level, I believe the coffee itself should tell you what it needs, and I want the control to actually respond to that. By listening to this episode, you'll understand why water is not just a background variable but one of the most powerful tools in your brewing process, and you'll start thinking about what your own water choices are actually doing to your cup.

Transcript

[00:00:01] Nobody owns the IP of your being. Nobody owns how you brew your coffee. That includes your water.

[00:00:11] A while back, when I was doing all my experiments, I said it tongue in cheek, almost as a hypothetical. All the things I was doing, mixing tap water with distilled water, spring water, and all that, that's 95% of what you actually need to brew a good, tasty cup of coffee.

[00:00:47] I did say that I was going to get to the point where I start making my own water to understand it even more. I don't think I could have done it at that time, just because of the information and knowledge I didn't have about mixing or tasting water for what it is. Now that I've spent the past couple of months going deeper, I believe I'm there.

[00:01:17] A little over a year ago, I found and rekindled myself back to Third Wave Water. It was a big difference from what I was using before, which was just tap water. I didn't think water was that big of a deal until I came back, found this lonely package in the back, a classic profile. I did a taste test and instantly knew the difference. Over the year, I've been raving about it, and I do still think it's a good product. We'll get into how I think you should use it if you decide to go that route.

[00:02:07] I started to notice a couple of things. My coffees were a little heavier. They were acidity-based, all of them. The dark roast profile gave me the best opportunity for sweetness, but at the end of the day, all my coffees essentially started tasting the same. It could be the profile in the package, and it doesn't help that I was also using a cone-shaped filter brewer in front of all my brews. That's a story for another day.

[00:03:00] It wasn't frustration. It was more that I was becoming more aware with my palate, trying to understand the coffee for what it really is. When that became a hindrance, when that became a problem to actually taste my coffees, that's when I started to explore.

[00:03:25] People on my channel mentioned a couple of things. I tried them. They started to work instantly. I started to taste the coffees a little more. I was getting more sweetness across various coffees. And I sat there wondering: can this get even better?

[00:03:52] 95 percent is where we need to be. Your water is going to be good. Everything else you're trying to do is going to work. But I needed to go just a little bit deeper into that rabbit hole.

[00:04:14] Some of the things I started to notice that I wanted to address: I wanted to actually know the mineral content of my water. I wanted to know the ratios, where the splits were, whether a particular profile would actually bring sweetness out of the coffee. I wanted to dial in the PPM all the way down to 100 PPM, ten points forward and back depending on the situation.

[00:04:57] I noticed, and it made sense given how heavy things were, that Third Wave Water mixed into still water was landing around 163 PPM. To me, that's pretty high. Now that I understand TDS and water chemistry, one way to get past that and mitigate the issue is simply adding more water to bring down the PPM. I remember someone mentioning that, and it holds true here. But I didn't really know what was in those packages, and rightfully so. Why would Third Wave Water tell me exactly what's in them? That's their IP. Same as how nobody owns the IP of your being.

[00:06:00] I've been thinking about how to present this for a while. I went ahead and started down this rabbit hole using ChatGPT and Claude. The reason I went that route is because there are people in the coffee industry who have the water thing dialed in, but I didn't simply want to take a course and just tell you how that person went about it when the best thing you can do is pay for it directly. AI helps you figure things out on your own, seeing if you can really get there. I used both language models on purpose, pitching them against each other to see what they came back with. A lot of the information is already online, but it's easier to type in a prompt and get what you need.

[00:07:17] I got the actual minerals. I started mixing them. I've already started playing around with different chemistries, and I'm about to start drinking more coffees with these profiles.

[00:07:37] The reason I'm going this route, and I don't think it's Third Wave Water's fault, it's just how I look at things. They have a light roast profile, a medium roast profile, and a dark roast profile. After spending over a year playing around with their product, I don't think that's the right approach. I think the better way to go about it is to have a sweetness profile and an acidity profile.

[00:08:11] The reason is that coffee across light, medium, and dark roast levels can exhibit acidity. They can exhibit sweetness, some more than others. Just because a coffee is lightly roasted doesn't mean the best move is to keep amplifying acidity. That's what I got a lot of times with those packages. My route is different.

[00:08:47] I want to bring the PPM down to around 100 PPM. That's my ideal mouthfeel. I like coffee that tastes neutral at that point. You're still able to extract well, and if you need to adjust things in your brew, you can do that. Then I'm going to have a sweetness profile and an acidity profile.

[00:09:15] Depending on the coffee, let's say it's an Ethiopian lightly roasted coffee. It's acidic and it keeps singing. I want to be able to use the sweetness profile, or whatever that coffee tells me it needs, to either bring down or bring out more of the acidity, or bring out more of the sweetness. I want to see where that coffee actually wants to be. I can play around with different brewers too, but that's where I'm at with all of this.

[00:09:54] I'm still going to try those packages, those bottles of marketing as I call them right now. I want to see if it really does matter and compare what I've made. I'll probably pick up one or two since they're fairly expensive. But the concoctions and minerals I've gotten can easily last over a year. Just a couple of drops here and there and you're off to the races. That's what I've noticed so far. It's actually a lot cheaper to just make your own water profiles.

[00:11:06] The bigger point I want to make is this. No matter what I do, no matter what you do, no matter what other people tell you, you're your own person. You are drinking this coffee for yourself in your own home. So no matter what we do or say about all of this, we're the ones making these decisions for ourselves. Me going down this route is my decision. Me picking a particular brewer for a coffee is my decision. I'll tell you the reasons why and give you as much context as possible, but at the end of the day it's about your own choices.

[00:12:24] This isn't me bashing anyone. This is me evolving, growing, questioning everything, seeing what actually works, asking myself why. That's really where I'm at.

[00:12:48] So I know it may seem like I'm just over here doing my thing. What are you doing with your own decisions? Why are you picking the things you're picking? Do you just want to stick with one brewer? That's perfectly fine. At the end of the day, I believe this is going to be extremely helpful for me. As I figure it out, geek out, try this, try that, try it on this coffee, I'll be looking forward to sharing it all with you.

[00:13:32] We're just talking about coffee here. Trying to grow, trying to understand it, trying to be less frustrated. We want to know that when we push a lever, we're going to get a result most of the time. We want to be able to go back and figure out how we got those happy accidents so we can repeat them. That's where we're at.

[00:14:17] This whole thing is a lot of fun for me. I was just editing a video, it took a long time, and I said out loud: this is so much fun. I still feel that. As I try to understand and geek out and get to the promised land of really knowing this coffee thing, in this case through water, as long as it stays fun, I'm here for you.

[00:14:57] So where do you fit in the water conversation? Are you team tap water, distilled water, Third Wave Water, or are you going the mad water magician route like I am right now? How much does it really matter to you?

[00:15:27] I'm not going to lie, for the longest time it didn't matter to me and I didn't get it. I'm still kicking myself because I wish I'd gotten there sooner. But it's okay. The beauty of all of this is that it's our journey. We come to things when we come to them. But where are you with your water game?

[00:15:52] Water matters to me because I want to be the ultimate manipulator of this process. I want to be the person who gets a bag of coffee, smells it, looks at the notes, brews that first cup, and has my head spinning trying to figure out how to make it better. How to suit it more to my palate. Massage it here, adjust it there. I want that control. All of this is about control.

[00:16:39] If I can control something for two or three minutes and it comes out fantastic, that's my driving light.

[00:16:53] These episodes are therapeutic for me too. Sometimes when you start actually talking about things, they come to you in ways they don't when you're just thinking. Water is just one piece of the pie for me to master, to conquer, to control this coffee thing. Not in a bad way, but in a way where I feel I can bring the best out of it with all the tools and knowledge I have. And water is an extremely critical part of that.

[00:17:38] That's why I'm doing what I'm doing. I can't wait to share more about this with you. Let me know what you think. Where's your water game in all of this? Talk to you later.