The SCAA (Specialty Coffee Association of America) recommends 1.15% - 1.35% coffee solids for an ideally flavored cup of coffee. That leaves ~98% of the flavor up to the water itself -- something not a lot of people talk about. Some folks want to reduce the descaling maintenance required by using distilled water or water that is put through a reverse osmosis system that has no mineral content in it, meaning it won't contribute to scale build up on the equipment. But thorough testing by scientists much more focused on this than us has revealed that the ideal mineral content for coffee is 150 parts per million (ppm) of total dissolved solids (tds). More than that and you run the risk of under-extracting the coffee (basically, there's not enough allowable space in the water for the coffee particles to be absorbed) and less than that means you can likely over-extract (there's too much space and it takes on too many coffee particles). Commercial coffee operations invest in high end water treatment systems that will ensure they're using the best possible water/mineral balance to easily make excellent coffee. This is of particular concern to large chains that have cafes in different cities as they can't rely on the local water's tap to be the same across the board. Companies such as Cirqua came along to address this issue for cafes, but they understood that most folks that wanted to make coffee at home just weren't going to invest in a high end filtration system. So they developed this easy-to-use solution that you can employ at home: Add the two capsules (per dosage) to one gallon of distilled water and you have the perfectly balanced mineral water to make an awesome cup of coffee. We tested it out at the store, check out our results:
