Source Good Water for Your Coffee

Why is water important for good coffee?

If you think about it, the finished product of a cup of coffee only really has two ingredients—coffee and water. We've all had water that didn't taste good all on its own. Use that water to make coffee, and obviously the coffee won't taste great either.

But there's more going on. When you brew a cup of coffee, the hot water pulls tasty stuff (and bitter stuff) out of the coffee and into the water. This chemical process works better when there are trace minerals (such as calcium) in the water. Try making coffee with distilled water, and you probably won't like the taste very much.

How do I get good water for my coffee?

For most people, especially if you live somewhere with clean tap water, simply running the water that comes through your tap through a generic water filter will improve it more than enough for coffee purposes. If you want to get fancier than that, or if your home tap water is particularly poor-tasting, hard, or otherwise bad for coffee, you can get gallons of "purified" or "spring" water from most grocery stores. Avoid getting distilled water unless you're specifically purchasing packets of minerals to add back into it (there are several brands of this sort of thing available online).

Does temperature make a big difference?

Well, yes and no. It's very important that your water is hot enough. Some inexpensive drip brewers don't heat the water to its full boiling point. That will negatively affect your finished brew. But, there is a common misconception that water which is TOO hot will "burn" the coffee, making it taste bitter and unpleasant. In my experience, this has not been the case. Coffee beans are raised to much, much higher temperatures during the roasting process than even boiling hot water will make them during the brew. Add to that the fact that the water cools very rapidly once you pour it onto your coffee grounds, and there's really not any danger from having your water at any temperature a common kettle would raise it to. You won't "hurt" your coffee at all by using ~212° water rather than the supposedly more ideal ~205°.

With that said, some brewing methods use much cooler water—even in some cases as cool as ~185°. So temperature does affect the final product. You should experiment to find what you like best.