Today, we may be at the begin­ning of what many are now claim­ing is the fourth-wave of cof­fee. Never before has more care been taken in select­ing beans, roast­ing them, and brew­ing them for indi­vid­ual and mar­ket con­sump­tion. As Keefe Aldstadt of OptiPure explains, “People spend six, eight, even ten thou­sand dol­lars on their espresso machines. Baristas are con­cerned with reg­u­lat­ing tem­per­a­ture of water to one or two degrees, con­cerned with man­ag­ing pres­sure, con­cerned with reg­u­lat­ing as many vari­ables they can so they can be assured they will get con­sis­tent results every time they pull a shot.” And yet, with all of the care taken to con­trol every vari­able of extrac­tion and brew­ing, one glar­ing aspect of prepa­ra­tion is still often over­looked: water quality.

For those who have yet to imple­ment a water fil­tra­tion sys­tem at their cof­fee shop or at home, con­sider this: water is around 98% of a typ­i­cal cup of cof­fee, and it there­fore plays an enor­mous role in the actual taste of your final prod­uct. Aldstadt con­tin­ues, “the one ingre­di­ent that has more vari­ables than all the rest com­bined is water… and with that said I can’t imag­ine any­one who is seri­ous about the qual­ity and con­sis­tency of their prod­ucts not focus­ing on water as much as every other aspect of the business.”

Even if your water is already con­ducive to pro­duc­ing a great cup of cof­fee, it is impor­tant to note that the min­eral makeup of water varies a vast amount across the coun­try, and often even across the span of a sin­gle city. 3M Purification’s Frank Rossi explains, “Water varies in dif­fer­ent parts of the coun­try. That is why it is crit­i­cal to have the water tested before mak­ing a deci­sion on a water treat­ment device.” The only way to imple­ment a sys­tem appro­pri­ate to your needs is to first under­stand what exactly needs to be treated. Fortunately a lot of com­pa­nies will pro­vide ini­tial water analy­sis free of charge. For instance, Everpure will mail you a water test and pro­vide you with a com­plete analy­sis free of charge when you mail it back.

Paying atten­tion to the min­eral con­tent of your water can not only improve the taste of your pre­pared in-store prod­uct, but can also help ensure con­sis­tency from your busi­ness to your customer’s home. If you sell roasted beans, it is impor­tant that your cus­tomers be able to recre­ate the cof­fee they had at your store while at home. In this respect, a water qual­ity stan­dard is nec­es­sary to ensure that cof­fee is appre­ci­ated for its actual taste, rather than the min­eral makeup of the water in which it is brewed. As Skip Finley of Cirqua Customized Water states, “Coffee should fla­vor the water, water shouldn’t fla­vor the coffee.”

To this end, the SCAA has pub­lished a set of stan­dards regard­ing min­eral con­tent that they con­sider opti­mal for cof­fee brew­ing. Coffee shop own­ers can imple­ment water treat­ment in their stores based on these stan­dards, and then edu­cate and pro­vide resources for their cus­tomers to recre­ate sim­i­larly for­mu­lated water at home. One great way to ensure cus­tomers are get­ting the same taste at home as they are at your store is The Formula™ by Cirqua Customized Water. The Formula™ is a packet of min­er­als that when added to dis­tilled water pro­duces opti­mally for­mu­lated water for brew­ing the best and most con­sis­tent cof­fee pos­si­ble, with­out hav­ing to pur­chase expen­sive fil­ters or equip­ment to do so. This is a sim­ple solu­tion for cus­tomers, and it can be dis­played next to your roasted beans to encour­age cus­tomer aware­ness of the impact of water in the cof­fee brew­ing process.

Not only should water treat­ment sys­tems be val­ued for their effect on taste and con­sis­tency, but also for their role in the longevity of your brew­ing equip­ment. Espresso machines are intri­cate and com­plex, and using untreated water to brew espresso can lead to dam­ag­ing min­eral buildup and expen­sive repair or replace­ment costs. To this end, imple­ment­ing a proper water fil­tra­tion sys­tem can be seen as a wise invest­ment to those inter­ested in keep­ing their machines work­ing prop­erly and their over­all costs down. Furthermore, the higher qual­ity prod­uct that results from the use of a water treat­ment sys­tem, and the expected increase in profit that is likely to fol­low can also off­set the cost of imple­ment­ing such a sys­tem. To this end, Frank Rossi of 3M Purification com­ments that proper fil­tra­tion leads to “bet­ter tast­ing cof­fee and less equip­ment down time. The for­mula we use is: Better Water = Better Coffee = Better Business.”

The impor­tant thing to keep in mind when pur­su­ing water treat­ment for your cof­fee shop or home is that the intel­li­gence of your sys­tem will only go as far as the knowl­edge of your treat­ment provider. There are many dif­fer­ent kinds and com­bi­na­tions of sys­tems, and solu­tions vary greatly depend­ing on the min­eral con­tent of the water you will be using, as well as the vol­ume you expect to use every day. It is advis­able to find a treat­ment provider that is not only famil­iar with dif­fer­ent types of treat­ment, but that is also famil­iar with the best water for­mu­la­tion for the cof­fee indus­try.  Talk to sev­eral dif­fer­ent providers, ask them what kind of sys­tems they offer, what main­te­nance costs are like and whether or not they are famil­iar with water treat­ment for cof­fee brew­ing. Keefe Aldstadt of OptiPure com­ments, “a lot of com­pa­nies have knowl­edge and exper­tise, and some have more than oth­ers, but until you actu­ally talk to some­one and find out if you are com­fort­able work­ing with them it is hard to give rel­e­vant advice on how to pick a com­pany. Call them!” Ultimately what is most impor­tant is to choose an informed and multi-faceted com­pany that can help you come up with a water solu­tion spe­cific to your unique needs.

The spe­cialty cof­fee indus­try is evolv­ing rapidly, and more and more com­pa­nies and cafes are uti­liz­ing water treat­ment sys­tems to keep up. Overall, pos­i­tive devel­op­ments in water qual­ity have helped ele­vate even the most prized cof­fee to lev­els that would be impos­si­ble with­out such devel­op­ments. SCAA’s water qual­ity stan­dards ben­e­fit the cof­fee indus­try by pro­vid­ing for increased con­sis­tency, as well as the abil­ity to more accu­rately deter­mine qual­ity. Greater adher­ence to such stan­dards will make the indus­try more effi­cient, as cof­fee at ori­gin can be priced accu­rately accord­ing to its true value. Furthermore, prop­erly treated water can eas­ily decrease oper­at­ing costs for cof­fee retail­ers by reduc­ing equip­ment repair and ser­vice costs. And finally, water treat­ment sys­tems can help cof­fee shop own­ers rest assured that they are deliv­er­ing a min­i­mally vari­able prod­uct that doesn’t under­uti­lize or under appre­ci­ate the qual­ity of the bean.