Making a truly great cup of coffee requires great beans, an expert roaster, the right grind, and proper technique.
But an often-overlooked element of brewing coffee at home is what constitutes perhaps 99% of the delicious drink’s weight: Water.
To craft the tastiest cup o’ joe, you shouldn’t buy jugs of distilled or “pure” water, or spend money on expensive water-filtration devices.
In fact, in most parts of the country, the stuff out of our taps is probably the best kind of coffee-brewing H2O you could hope for.
In search of a better brew
Christopher H. Hendon, a chemist at MIT, discovered the importance of water in coffee after overhearing a conversation between two frustrated baristas.
“They were having problems with coffee that tasted good one day and not another,” Hendon previously told Business Insider. While that’s a frustrating mystery for a coffee shop with exacting standards, but “from a chemistry point of view, that’s an interesting problem,” Hendon said.
