My Water Was the Problem

I stayed at my sister’s for four nights in June and brought my own coffee, because I am that person now, and on the second morning I made a cup in her kitchen with beans from my own bag and it was better. Not slightly. Obviously, immediately better, the kind of difference I have already admitted I usually cannot detect. Same beans, same rough method, a borrowed kettle and a mug that was not mine.

I stood in her kitchen genuinely puzzled, and then I looked at her kettle, which was clean inside, and thought about mine at home, which was not.

Same bag, different kitchen

I want to be careful here, because everything else had changed too. Different kettle, different mug, I was on holiday, I had slept properly for once, the light was different. All of that affects how something tastes and I know it.

But it kept happening. Four mornings, four better cups. And when I got home and made one in my own kitchen on the fifth morning, it went back to what it had been, which was fine, but noticeably duller. Flat, slightly chalky, with the interesting parts sanded off.

That was the first time I had ever produced a difference I could actually taste in a comparison, and it made me pay attention, because I had assumed for years that water was one of those variables people fuss about to fill the time.

Everything else I blamed first

The grinder, obviously. I took it apart and cleaned it, which it badly needed and which changed nothing about the problem.

The beans. I bought a fresh bag from somewhere else in case the shop had sold me something tired. Same result.

My technique, which I revised twice, mostly by pouring more carefully and waiting longer, and which produced a slightly different cup with the same flat quality underneath.

The mug, which sounds silly, but I did try a different one, because at that point I was working through the list. No change.

It took me about two weeks to get round to the water, which is embarrassing given it is most of what is in the cup. I think I skipped it because it seemed too basic to be the answer, and because doing something about it felt like a larger project than swapping a mug.

The white crust in the kettle

My kettle had a layer inside it. A pale, hard, slightly rough coating up the sides and across the element, which had been building for I do not know how long and which I had stopped seeing entirely. My sister’s kettle was six weeks old.

We have hard water here. I knew that in the abstract, in the way you know things about your postcode, but I had never connected it to what I was drinking every morning. The shower screen, the kettle, the marks on the glasses out of the dishwasher, all the same story, and coffee is mostly water.

I descaled the kettle, which was unpleasant and required doing twice. That alone helped a little. It did not close the gap.

Filtered, boiled, bottled

I tried three things over about a month, not scientifically, just one after the other while paying attention.

Straight from the tap after descaling. Better than before. Still the flat quality, still a slight dryness at the end of the cup.

A jug filter, the ordinary kind that sits in the fridge. This was the one that did it. The difference was not subtle for me, and I say that as someone who failed to distinguish two coffees side by side in a shop. The cup had a middle again. The dryness went.

Bottled water, which I tried for a week out of curiosity and then abandoned. It was fine. It was not better than filtered, it cost money and produced plastic, and carrying it home was tedious. I would not do it again for daily coffee.

There is a real caveat, which is that a jug filter needs its cartridge changed, and I have twice let mine run far past when it should have been swapped, and both times the coffee slid back toward flat and I blamed the beans first. Again. I now change it on a schedule I do not think about.

Water that has been sitting

The second thing I found is smaller but free. Water that has been standing in the kettle overnight and then boiled makes a duller cup than fresh water from the tap, and water that has been boiled twice is worse than water boiled once.

I cannot explain the chemistry and I am not going to pretend to. What I can tell you is that on the mornings I boil yesterday’s leftover water because it saves ten seconds, the cup is less good, and I have caught myself doing it and drinking the result often enough to believe the pattern.

So I tip out whatever is in there and fill it fresh. It costs nothing. It has become part of the sequence and I no longer think about it.

How much this actually matters

Less than the freshness of the beans, in my experience. If I had to fix one thing in someone’s kitchen it would be a bag of coffee that was roasted this month, not a filter jug.

But it matters more than most of the things people spend money on, and it is the cheapest fix I have found. A jug and a cartridge cost less than a nice bag of beans and last much longer.

And if your water is soft, all of this may be irrelevant to you and I would not go looking for the problem. That is really my point. This was not a universal truth I discovered, it was a local one about my own postcode and my own neglected kettle. The useful move was noticing that a thing had changed and then working backwards, which took me two weeks longer than it should have because I refused to suspect the boring answer.