How it is working?
It is well known that many parameters of the coffee like place of origin, type, roasting, grinding have impact on the quality of the coffee drink. Espresso machine have significant impact on extraction quality and thus the results too. These parameters, methods are well documented and widely available, easy to gather the relevant information. The importance of water (and dissolved contents), which is the second most important component of coffee is much less known.
There are several effects. First of all, everyone must have been drinking several types of mineral water, and everyone has a favorite. The taste of mineral waters is caused by the presence of minerals and salts. These salts themselves change the taste of water. Salty, bitter, sour, sweet. Minerals and salts influence the taste of coffee the same way. This is why the compounds of water have huge impact on coffee taste.
We pour 1 dl of water into a glass, then add a tablespoon salt (20 grams). Salt will slowly dissolve. However, if we add additional 20 grams of salt, we will reach a limit, when the salt will not dissolve anymore, because the salt’s solution limit is 39.5 g / 100 ml (in normal conditions). As reaching the saturation limit of the solution, no more salt can be dissolved. Coffee has a saturation limit too, which means after reaching the limit no further coffee can be solved in the water. The key is salt content. If the water’s salt content is already high, we can only dissolve lower amount of coffe. This means if coffee is prepared from a high mineral content water, the less coffee can be dissolved, which will result a poof quality, empty coffee with bad taste. Low mineral content water can dissolve more coffee but this does not necessarily mean that our coffee will tase good.
You might think that you pure water will be the best for making coffee. I refer to the point that the salts in the water change the taste of the coffee. This means that pure water will not result nice coffee, On the toher hand there is a much more complicated process that takes place during the extraction of coffee. To understand this, we need to dig deeper into the world of chemistry. During dissolving salts in water they will simply be separated. There will be positively charged ions (such as Li +, Na +, K +, Mg ++, Ca ++, Fe +++, Cu ++, Mn ++, Zn ++, etc.) and there will have negatively charged ions (Cl-, SO4-, NO3-, O-, PO4– etc.) .). During the coffee brewing process, the presence of these ions will help to dissolve certain compounds, playing a catalytic role. This means they are not involved in the dissolution process, but their presence provide the organic substances to be dissolved in the water. The presence of various types of inorganic compounds is therefore essential, since without them ionic soluble compounds will not enter the solution in other wordsl into our coffee.
Everyone must have heard of deionized water, and many may have heard of ion exchange resin. In the process of ion exchange, ions are exchanged with each other. For example, when water is softened with the most commonly used cation exchange resin, the cations in the water are replaced with sodium ions, which no longer cause calcification. We have a magic ion, the carbonate ion, which is a water-soluble form of carbon dioxide that exists in the form of hydrogen carbonate together with metals. This is important because hydrogen carbonates are very unstable and can decompose rapidly, even after heating. They also cause scaling. The white flange on the edge of the boiler which is difficult to be removed. The same instability that makes hydrogen carbonates so important during coffee brewing. Under pressure and heat, hydrogen carbonate decomposes to carbon dioxide, leaving a cation left. Carbon dioxide on the one hand causes the crema on the top of the coffee. The free cation in the ground coffee is now free to participate in ion exchange processes where it is bound to the ground coffee and organic compounds are released. Other salts participate in ion exchange processes as well during coffee brewing, and increasing the variety and amount of flavoring substances.
The importance of charged ions, or why it matters what salts or ions are in the water. In the above section, we have already mentioned cations and anions. When mentioning it, we wrote nasty plus and minus marks. We wrote the most typical ionic form of the element that exist. Cations, as ions of metals, might exist in a wide variety of forms. The number of minus and plus signs after the element’s symbolize the oxidation number of that specific element, which is important because it tells you whether one ion reacts with another or not. The oxidation number affects the ionic strength, which is the effect of the ionic charge. Depending on the ionic strength, the dissolution of the organic and inorganic substances in the coffee varies from the catalytic part of the ion exchange, so it is important what kind ions and how many ions are present in our coffee brewing water.
In summary: The nature and amount of salts in the water greatly influence the taste of the coffee, via the ionic strength and ionic concentration through catalytic processes and direct ion exchange, they all affect the nature and amount of compounds in the finished product. With different saline water we can spice up completely different flavors of the same coffee using the same equipment (grinding machine, coffee machine) using the same conditions (quantities, temperature). According to our experiments, even a change in salt concentration of up to 3 mg / l can cause significant differences in taste due to the processes discussed above. A good composition of water brings out the most of coffee and does not take the flavors into any directions. We have developed several types of water because different roasting methods, different grinding fineness, and different brewing methods enhance the dissolution process, so the composition of the water needsto be adapted to them.
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