Let’s chat today about formulating great water for brewing coffee at home.

Coffee is 98% water. For great coffee, you need great water. However, all of us struggle sometimes at home finding great quality water. Sometimes your tap water is not where you want it to be. It may have a lot of chlorine or some other unwanted flavors and aromas. Maybe you have well water that’s a little bit dirty and you have to do a lot of filtering to get it to where you want it for your coffee to taste good.
However, there is an alternative to filtering that allows you to formulate a more precise water formula that’s very repeatable and also tastes very good.

So, what we can do is take distilled water and remineralize it to get us to a TDS (or total hardness range) of anywhere from 90-150 (inexpensive TDS meters can be found on Amazon).

In order to do this we’re going to basically take a pair of 1L containers and fill both with distilled water, then add 12.5g of Epsom salt to one and 8.5g of baking soda to the other. Then we will shake them to dissolve the Epsom salts and baking soda. Afterwards, we will take 1 gallon of distilled water and add 45g of each solution to achieve a TDS of about 110. IF you feel your water is too weak, you can always add a little bit more of each solution.

If your TDS was overshot, you can use a little bit less of each solution the next time.

Hope this helped!