Took me 8 months to figure out my tap water was killing my pour over

I chased every variable on my V60 for 8 months, new grinder, new kettle, different beans from 3 local roasters in Portland, and still got flat muddy cups every single morning. Turns out my tap water runs at 320 ppm and the scale was coating my burrs and hiding the real flavor, so one $20 filter fixed in a day what gear swaps couldn't touch. Anyone else burn months on technique when the actual problem was what came out of the faucet?

1 comments

Log in to join the discussion

Log In

1 Comment

noahs824h ago

320 ppm is high but it's not arsenic, plenty of people pull great shots with hard water and just descale on a schedule. The real question is whether you actually tested the water before or after you bought all that gear, because it sounds like you changed five things at once and are giving all the credit to the filter. Maybe the grinder and beans were fine and you just finally dialed in your recipe the same week you got the filter. Plenty of us have blamed water when the truth was stale beans or a grind setting that was off by two clicks the whole time.

1