Using the right water for coffee was one of the best tips I learned from multiple sources in order to improve coffee at home. I live in a place in Italy with extremely hard water, so I have a cleaning filter installed that still leaves a series of minerals. Water is good to drink but not to brew coffee.
The solution I’m using now is bottled water, which works really well except for the fact that buying and wasting plastic isn’t ideal at all
Is there any way to obtain good quality water without having a ton of plastic in my bin? I mean I could buy mineral pills or something but still I’d need first to get demineralised water somehow, most likely bottled. So I don’t know really
I use a ZeroWater filter to get down to 0 Total Dissolved Solids and then third wave packets to reintroduce good minerals for coffee. Its still the case for me that this is cheaper than trying to buy distilled water or using distillation. Reverse osmosis is probably cheaper overall but a lot more initial outlay and it depends on how much water you need.
Brita and other similar small filters do a poor job of removing total dissolved solids (for me its the difference between 260 and 245 which is almost none removed) so they don’t change the situation for coffee extraction all that much
Seconding ZeroWater filters. They’re black magic. Fast, convenient, and the taste I get in my espresso is miles better than any Brita filter.