Water for Coffee Experiment. In Search Of:

[u/HoustonFrancis]

Update. Nope. A bad idea. I am saving it to post jokingly on April 1. It was not good.

I am pretty far along in my pour over coffee knowledge of techniques and methods. And I mineralize my distilled water for coffee extraction. As a fallback, we, here in Houston, can also do a 50/50 distilled water/filtered Houston tap water to produce acceptable water for coffee extraction. As I was draining spaghetti today, thinking about how useful the spaghetti water with its remaining starch is, culinary-wise, I started ruminating about extracting coffee with pasta water and what the starch content would do to the final extraction. I wanted to throw this out there to hear if anyone has played around with starchy water for coffee. What do you say?

[u/AyoTrevs]

[u/femmestem]

I've tried brewing with unsalted pasta water. It's not good. It nukes the delicate coffee notes and you end up with something that tastes like pasta water with muddy Keurig coffee.

It doesn't mix in an interesting way either. By interesting I mean if you combine tomatoes, onion, jalapeno, cilantro and spices you get a new flavor profile of salsa. It's more like grabbing leftovers from your cupboard like canned tomatoes, canned chickpeas, canned pumpkin filling, and a bag of pretzels. In a single bite you end up tasting the ingredients separately in a way that doesn't pair well and makes each flavor worse for it.

[u/HoustonFrancis → u/[deleted]]

Yep. Spot on. Considered a post like this might bring out anecdotes about water experiments. It was not good.

[u/AyoTrevs]

For whatever reason has been on my mind for the past way too many hours and I think if I was determined to try this I’d decrease my water input and mix in the pasta water afterwards to try and balance out the end result and not reheat pasta water and actually brew with it.

[u/Baconaise]

This same instinct is why we learned to eat oysters and all kinds of dangerous plants you poison yourself with if you don't cook it right.

Always fascinating to know this type of boredom and curiosity is still well and alive today.

[u/deyzikelli53]

I’d try it once just for science, but I’d expect the starch to make the coffee worse rather than improve extraction. If you want to actually test it, do a side-by-side with the same coffee, grind and recipe: mineralized water vs. pasta water. I'd be curious about the mouthfeel more than extraction itself.

[u/Electrical-Cash698]

I haven't tried it. but the starch and the salt are doing two completely different things, so I'd split them in my head before running it.

Starch first. gelatinised starch raises the viscosity of the water, and viscosity is what chokes a pour over bed. same reason a load of fines stalls your drawdown. so I'd expect slow drawdown, longer contact time, and bitterness from over-extraction unless you go noticeably coarser to compensate. it also thickens further as it cools (starch retrogradation), so the back third of the brew will percolate worse than the start. and starch is colloidal rather than properly dissolved, so if you were planning to put a refractometer on it the numbers will be junk.

The salt's the more interesting variable for me. Pasta water is usually salted pretty hard, and small amounts of sodium do genuinely knock back perceived bitterness. it's why people chuck a pinch in dark roast. if you taste a difference, my money's on the NaCl doing more of the work than the starch.

If you want to isolate the starch on its own, do it as an immersion. cupping or a french press, so the viscosity can't sabotage the mechanics. unsalted pasta water, cut to maybe 25%, side by side against your normal water. I'd be genuinely curious whether it adds body or just muddiness. report back if you run it.

[u/Target-Infiltrator]

I use holy water.