And today we're gonna be messing around and having some fun with the buffer.

To explain this, I'm gonna have to talk to you about water chemistry in relation to coffee brewing on.

Lots of you are hoping that this is gonna be that video, the one that explains everything.

The one that says, which is the right set of water chemistry for the best tasting coffee.

This is not that video.

I am gonna talk to you about a couple of key aspect of water chemistry, though, but before we begin, I do need to shadow.

It's got radio.

This is ultimately his idea. 00:00:56.660 --> 00:01:6.350 He mentioned this this kind of big idea to me when he was in London on its nagged at the back of my brain, and I wanted to try it, and I thought this was the perfect opportunity.

So let's talk water chemistry, and I'm gonna do it in a way that I hope it's simple enough that if you don't care that much, it still makes sense.

And if you do care, you don't feel like I'm basically lying to you now.

For a long time, we talked about TDs in water, and that's total dissolved solids.

And if you look at, say, the back of a bottle of mineral water, you'll be able to see what kind of minerals are dissolved in that water.

Now, TDs is easy to measure.

You could buy a cheap TVs meter.

I'll tell you how much stuff is in the water, and we use that for a long time to kind of tune our recipes and tune our water treatment.

But people like Maxwell Kelowna Dashwood pretty vocal in saying TDs is kind of useless. 00:01:53.930 --> 00:02:0.760 It tells you that there's lots of stuff in there, but not what makes it up and really to massively oversimplify. 00:02:0.870 --> 00:02:5.350 There are two big categories of things when it comes to coffee that are important. 00:02:6.010 --> 00:02:9.650 The first are the minerals, things like calcium things like magnesium.

These are necessary to help extract coffee flavor.

Too much can be bad, but not enough can be bad as well.

With calcium and magnesium, they each get involved in slightly different reactions.

So having a load of calcium will produce a brew that tastes quite different to having a load of magnesium.

We're not gonna get too deep into that today.

The other key aspect of water chemistry is what's called the buffer.

The alkalinity of the water buffering compounds when they go into solution produced both a weak acid and a weak base in that solution, right, So if you add an acid to thumb, that base reacts with that acid and it neutralizes it.

That way, your pH doesn't move too much.

Who hadn't acid toe a buffet solution?

Now things like your blood have a ton of buffer in them.

Because of the pH of your blood moves much a toll.

You're dead. 00:02:58.640 --> 00:03:2.130 That's very bad Now in water by carbon. 00:03:2.130 --> 00:03:9.480 It acts as the buffering have compound here, so you'll see a correlation between the level of bicarbonate and it's alkalinity. 00:03:9.480 --> 00:03:11.130 It's buffering potential.

If you took a filter coffee and you had a ton of buffer in that water, you'd mute out.

A lot of interesting flavors would be very boring.

Now, much of the time that we talk about brewing water for coffee were often talking about filter coffee.

Now the strength of filter coffee is usually between, let's say, 1.3 to 1.5%.

That's how much of that coffee is dissolved coffee and the rest of the 98 point seven to the 98.5.

That's just water filter.

Coffee is not particularly strong at all now.

Espresso?

Well, that has a much higher concentration.

At that point, you're looking at maybe eight through 10 even 12% strength.

Scott.

Suggestion Waas.

What if the amount of buffer correlated to the strength off the beverage? 00:04:0.000 --> 00:04:0.350 Right. 00:04:0.430 --> 00:04:3.050 Having the right amount of buffer for filter coffee? 00:04:3.380 --> 00:04:6.820 Well, that might not be the right amount of buffer for espresso. 00:04:6.830 --> 00:04:11.580 What if you had, let's say, seven times more buffer in your espresso?

What would happen?

Would that moderate the acidity of a super light roast kind of filter coffee roast that when you brew it as espresso is just brutally dominantly, unpleasantly acidic.

So what we're gonna do is this.

We're gonna take a coffee.

We're gonna take a Kenyan coffee that was roasted for filter drinking.

We're gonna make some espresso with it.

That's gonna be our benchmark, because we could extract that.

But that end result as an espresso may not taste that good.

Let's start by getting an espresso machine.

Let's start by dialing it in with just some nice brewing water and pulling shots of this light roast filter roast kind of coffee on seeing how that tests we're gonna do here to start off with his takes him doesn't mean normal bring water is relatively low in both minerals and actually relatively low and buffer.

But that's okay because I actually want a benchmark off. 00:04:59.290 --> 00:05:1.670 What will be a very acidic express? 00:05:1.670 --> 00:05:4.880 Er I'm gonna does 20 grams into this machine. 00:05:4.890 --> 00:05:9.510 I'm gonna pull 40 grams out in around 28 30 seconds. 00:05:9.520 --> 00:05:16.250 There should be a lot, a lot of acidity in the cup, which is what we want for this experiment.

I need some espresso.

We've got the all important teaspoon.

We can give this espresso a little stir.

No, that's got a lot of acidity.

That's got a lot of acidity in it.

This is exactly what I wanted to explore.

This is a great benchmark.

So this, you know, there's a ton of origin characteristics here.

I can taste the copy that went in there.

There is a ton of sweetness in this, but my oh my, this is sour so well, so on to our first experiment. 00:05:54.630 --> 00:06:5.600 So what I've done and you just have to trust me on this because I can't actually prove it to you is I've changed the water inside this this machine's tank, and we've gone to a very high alkalinity water. 00:06:5.600 --> 00:06:8.190 It's like 350 milligrams per liter. 00:06:8.200 --> 00:06:13.520 Our community, which is about seven times more than you would have in, say, good brewing water.

The question is, if you're going at much higher concentrations, if the concentration of espresso is seven times higher than that of filter ish, does the seven times higher alkalinity give you balance wherein you would usually struggle?

There's only one way to find out.

We have to make Maur delicious espresso something 20 grams of coffee in fortyish grams of coffee out and around about 30 seconds.

That's our benchmark.

Let's make it happen.

Looks good as it's definitely there, but it doesn't hurt my face.

Still, maybe a touch more acid that I might want your little harsh little harsh look bad about better than before. 00:06:58.840 --> 00:07:2.520 No, no physical pain as before. 00:07:2.630 --> 00:07:4.140 Now that's definitely interesting. 00:07:4.140 --> 00:07:6.650 But there is one big problem. 00:07:7.140 --> 00:07:14.840 High levels of bicarbonate, coupled with a reasonably high levels of minerals coupled with a hot environment equals lime scale.

So this kind of water is much, much, much more likely to scale up a machine and cause you problems.

At this point, there's something interesting here, but I'm not sure I'd recommend brewing with high alkalinity water.

There is one more idea to discuss, but before we do that, I just need to tell you about this video sponsor, which is square space, from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics square spaces, the all in one platform to build a beautiful online presence and to run your business.

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Now, I did have a second experiment in mind.

What I wanted to do was brew that original, that kind of benchmark espresso.

But add the alkalinity in afterwards. 00:08:57.610 --> 00:09:4.840 You see, our community is going to affect the extract of coffee right is gonna affect the liquid is gonna affect the pH of that liquid. 00:09:5.060 --> 00:09:7.390 It can affect it if you added into the machine. 00:09:7.390 --> 00:09:16.150 But there's no real reason that you couldn't just added into the cup and still have that buffering effect on the acidity of the cup.

Now you're gonna need a lot more bicarb here, like a lot more.

So I have made up a solution just using sitting by cabinet.

So this is 2000 milligrams per liter of our community.

That's a lot.

So what we should be able to do is just add maybe five grams of that water slightly dilute our espresso, but then add a bunch of buffer to that drink to see if it kind of mops up some acidity.

So what we're gonna need to do, of course, is to brew another espresso, give a little taste, Just give us a benchmark.

Yeah.

Yep, That's still that's still Berries.

Hour. 00:09:56.030 --> 00:10:2.900 So I have my super high alkalinity water here, but I'm gonna add maybe five grams. 00:10:4.510 --> 00:10:5.650 So does this work? 00:10:7.940 --> 00:10:8.550 Yes. 00:10:8.950 --> 00:10:9.600 Yes, it does.

There's still tons of acid here.

Like this was still on overwhelming level of acidity in the coffee that the buffer five grams of this buffer isn't gonna kind of mop it all up, But goodness mean, that's interesting change.

Now I'm trying to work out.

If it's in other ways changing or messing with my perception of the coffee, I feel like there's been a textural change here.

I know we need to do this double blind, and there's some floors here.

But there's no question that that that has changed the experience off this coffee.

It is more enjoyable to drink.

I don't know what this means.

I know that coffee science is weird.

I think we've got something kind of cool here.

I think we've got something really fun and definite.

Some of you at home can play with. 00:10:57.740 --> 00:11:2.450 Get some some bicarbonate of soda, and it's important you get bicarbonate of soda. 00:11:2.450 --> 00:11:5.040 Don't get baking powder that has other stuff. 00:11:5.040 --> 00:11:7.820 You want bicarbonate off soda sodium bicarbonate? 00:11:7.950 --> 00:11:8.650 That's what you want. 00:11:8.830 --> 00:11:9.300 It's cheap. 00:11:9.300 --> 00:11:9.950 It's everywhere. 00:11:9.960 --> 00:11:11.450 It's in every grocery store.

Get some.

You probably have some already dissolve it in water.

I used about 3.2 grams per liter to produce water that had about 2000 milligrams per liter of alkalinity.

Now you could probably double that actually, and be able to then use less in your espresso.

But this is so easy to do, and I think you should totally do it.

The potential is kind of interesting here.

I'd be really interested to hear if you don't like this.

The point here is that you could have, like, a little drop a bottle of water that has super high alkalinity.

And if you pull a shot that's well extracted, but just that little bit too acidic.

One drop two drops, three drops a gram, two grams.

Maybe that rounds it up.

Maybe that cleans it up.

Maybe you don't lose any origin characteristics.

Maybe you keep everything you like. 00:11:59.060 --> 00:12:2.120 You know, historically, we used sugar to fix acidity. 00:12:2.130 --> 00:12:2.480 Right. 00:12:2.550 --> 00:12:6.160 If you take lemon juice, if you add sugar to it, it becomes pleasant. 00:12:6.270 --> 00:12:9.400 The pH doesn't change, but the perceived acidity does. 00:12:9.820 --> 00:12:16.380 Here we're messing with the pH, and it changes the kind of acidity in a different way than sugar does right.

But it doesn't skew things.

It doesn't obscure things in the same way.

It's super interesting.

I want you to try it and tell me why this is a bad idea.

Tell me why this is stupid.

Tell me why this is wrong.

Tell me if it just makes you feel weird adding a little bit of by cup of soda to your espresso.

I think lots of coffee is it won't work, right.

Like this is for light roasted coffees that taste really good but are just too acidic when you bring them as espresso.

Where that concentration is just overwhelming.

I would love love to hear your thoughts if you try this.

Thank you so much for watching you Have a great day.