Recipe water means building your brewing water from scratch rather than treating tap water.
Why
Reproducibility. Tap water varies by season, by supply and by region. Built water is identical every time.
Precision. You can target the exact mineral profile you want, rather than whatever the filter happened to remove.
The method
Start with a blank — distilled or reverse osmosis water, which has essentially no dissolved minerals.
Add a measured mineral dose. Either a commercial sachet designed for a fixed volume, or a home-made concentrate.
The targets
Total hardness — 50 to 175 ppm as CaCO₃, ideally around 70 to 100. Alkalinity — around 40 ppm, and below 70. Magnesium favored over calcium, since it extracts the flavors people want and scales less.
Commercial sachets
Third Wave Water, Lotus, Aquacode and others. Add one sachet to a fixed volume of distilled water.
Simple, consistent, and expensive per liter.
Home-made concentrates
Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate) and baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) dissolved in distilled water as separate stock solutions, then dosed by volume.
Very cheap, and it requires a scale accurate to 0.01 g and some care.
Is it worth it
For filter, black, with good beans — yes. The difference is larger than most equipment upgrades.
For milk drinks — much less.
The warning
Never brew with distilled water alone. It extracts almost nothing and tastes hollow.
What people want to know
Is recipe water safe for my espresso machine?
Yes, at the usual targets: moderate hardness and low alkalinity scale slowly. Avoid very low-mineral water in machines with conductivity water-level sensors, which may not detect it.
Last reviewed 30 October 2026