Filter Stories - Coffee Documentaries28 Heinä 2025

How specialty coffee woke up to water’s role in flavour

For the longest time, the coffee community only cared about water’s impact ruining espresso machine boilers and kettles. But what about water’s impact on coffee flavour?

In this episode, I tell the story of how the specialty coffee community came to understand water chemistry: the pioneering work of the computational chemist Christopher Hendon and British roaster Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood, the genesis of the SCA’s Water Quality Handbook, and where we are today understanding the impact of minerals on our water.

I strongly recommend listening to the two episodes before this one first Getting great water for coffee, step-by-step & The two ingredients in water that ruin your coffee, and the ancient story behind them

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Want to go deeper into water chemistry?

Read the SCA’s Water Quality Handbook BWT White Paper on the effects of magnesium (German) Christopher Hendon’s Instagram where he’ll announce his new version of his book, Water for Coffee Do an online Certificate of Advanced Studies at the Coffee Excellence Centre

Season 3 of The Science of Coffee is made possible by these leading coffee organisations:

The Coffee Quest | BWT | TODDY | Algrano | Probat

Note: this is a reworked version of my 2022 episode Water for Brewing Coffee, including portions of my 2024 episode How to think like a scientist, part 2.

Check out Standart, the award-winning coffee magazine. Get a free magazine and a free bag of coffee by clicking here. How does Perfect Moose detect what kind of milk is in the pitcher? Click here to find out. See the Mikafi countertop roaster at the Thermoplan stand (6637) at World Of Coffee Brussels. Not attending? See it here. What does the Marco MilkPal look like to you? WALL-E? Something Steve Jobs would be proud of? Check it out here.

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