572 : Understanding Water For Coffee w/ Maxwell Dashwood

It's a very interesting, blurred line between having control over your water to the water actually being part of a flavoring of the coffee, right? This is Keys to the Shop, Episode 572, Understanding Water for Coffee with Maxwell Dashwood. Well, hey everybody and welcome to another episode of Keys to the Shop where we give you insights, inspiration and the tools you need to grow. As a coffee service professional, my name is Chris DeFirio. I am your host for the show and I'm always excited to have you along. Don't forget to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts or watch podcasts who we have these on YouTube as well. And share these episodes where you can on social media, on Instagram, on LinkedIn, wherever you are. Just spread the word about Keys to the Shop that'd be awesome or even leave a rating or review. Like five-star rating would be awesome on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts. Thank you everybody that has already done this and now I want to mention also that Keys to the Shop is available for coaching and consultation for coffee shop owners and their teams who want to do better in the cafe, want to elevate your operations, quality, your culture. I just got back from a trip doing some cafe assessment work and I do a lot of this work throughout the year and one of the things that's really cool is getting to work with people who get to start the right way the first time as well as we can. We work together this collaborative consultation relationship with Keys to the Shop for people who are just starting their first cafe or if you've been in business for quite a long time or any number of years but you want eyes on the operations, eyes on their quality and how can we do better? What are we not seeing? There's a lot of things we do to help people in that situation so if you're interested go ahead and reach out Chris at Keys to the Shop.com and also I want to let you know about the webinar that's coming up that is all about foundations for success. These are principles for coffee shop success. This webinar is called The Keys to the Shop, Principles for Coffee Shop or Cafe Success and it is our first webinar offering at Keys to the Shop. I'm pretty sure it's not going to be our last. That's starting at the beginning of December and you're going to be able to find a link to buy your ticket. It is $99 per person to this webinar and space is limited. It is a one hour presentation and then we are going to have 30 minutes of live Q&A so each person who signs up to be at this webinar is also going to be able to, if they are attending the webinar live, get a free hour of consultation as well from Keys to the Shop. Go ahead and check that out in the show notes for the webinar from Keys to the Shop on Principles for Cafe Success. Today's episode is brought to you by our friends at Arto Brick at Arto Brick on Instagram and then also our friends at the Pacific Berista series, that is PacificFoodService.com. We're going to talk more about them in the later part of this episode but right now what I want to do is introduce you to our guest today and that is Maxwell Dashwood returning guest to the show, longtime coffee professional and I don't want to use the word influencer. Let's just say somebody who is a thinker and producer of ideas in conversation in the industry of coffee starting where a lot of us start in the world of Berista work in 2007 in Melbourne. He moved back to the UK and founded Colonna and Smalls, a bath-based coffee house that focuses on curated coffee menus, co-founded and events company around that time. Right now he runs Colonna Coffee Roastery and has recently opened a Colonna and Smalls location in London and he also works on different coffee research and development projects. We had him on the show a while back talking about the business of specialty coffee which is a great book you should buy. You'll find links to these in the show notes and the last time we had Maxwell on the show we were talking about excellence in the maintaining of excellence in a cafe. This time we're going to talk about something that he's very well known for on top of being a three time UK Berista champion and fifth place finisher in the world Berista championship stage. Maxwell has written or did right with Christopher Hendon the book Water for Coffee. Water for Coffee is one of these classics that you can't really find anymore because nobody wants to give their copy up because it just took the world by storm. They sold out very quickly. It came out in 2015. Now 10 years later Christopher and Maxwell have gotten together and developed a second edition of this book which is coming out very very soon and we wanted to have Maxwell on the show to talk about yes the first book and water and coffee and the relationship between them and what's changed in the 10 years since the first book and now this second book and what are some changed thoughts and approaches. We really do get into the details about all of that stuff in this conversation and not only leaves you with a lot of questions about water which is great because now you get to continue your research and develop your understanding of water but also a framework that you can use that will help you in your pursuit of applicable knowledge not just asotaric knowledge and Maxwell talks about what he does in his cafe but just really kind of gives us some insights into the complexities and nuances of the topic of water and why it needs to be a topic that's at the forefront of our mind and how we can get there in a way that's going to make coffee taste great and how the customer will benefit from all of this. In fact the entire supply chain is going to benefit from how we understand water as a player in the quality equation of coffee. I'm always excited to talk to Maxwell because he has a lot of great ideas, a lot of passion around these subjects, one subject leads to the other and that's actually one of beautiful things about coffee is the depth of the topic, the depth of the beverage and this conversation reflects that. And I hope you get a lot out of this. I know I certainly did. I learned a lot just from this single conversation, you know, so let's get right to it. Here now is my conversation with the co-author of the book Water for Coffee Maxwell-Dashwood. Maxwell, great to have you back on the show. How's it going today? It's going well. Well, thanks. It's a pleasure to be back. I feel privileged to be back on your podcast. Thanks for having me. Of course. Yeah. And I was so excited to hear the second version of Water for Coffee is out in a, I think it's evolved into sort of like a cult status in terms of what, first of all, I can't find any copies online, there's maybe a boot like copy that somebody sold an eBay a few years ago, over the last 10 years. It's one of those books, like if you have a copy of Ili's chemistry book for a espresso, you don't really get rid of that. The science of quality. Yeah, the science of quality, that's exactly it. So it's one of those things that you say, well, I'm probably not going to sell this. So well done. And of course, we would love to have interviewed you on the publication of that first book. We weren't around at the time. So now we get the opportunity 10 years later, you've got this second version coming out. And I'm sure it's chock full of a lot of updates and information that's going to just help deep in our understanding about water. So I guess maybe the first question I have for you here to kick us off is when you produce a book like this, what's the goal? I mean, I guess it's the goal for the first one and the second one, but what's the thinking of how do I know this is a successful book for you? I mean, a lot of what I explore in coffee, not just books are two things. Things I'm interested in that I'm curious about and that I think that going through the process of writing it about benefits, studying that subject and learning about it, I think I've said before when I, when you write and publish, it makes you really think hard about what you're writing and publishing in a world where we digest a lot of information now from many different forms of content. I still think books we engage within a unique way and can do a longer form, especially more complex longer form stories or narratives. I think if I, let's go back to the beginning of water for coffee because you know, a lot of what exploring coffee is an area that I think is interesting and has value to understand better. So it's often a year old TED talk dynamic, which is we start with a problem, we then go on a journey and we find some answers maybe and then we still have loads of questions. Water for coffee is a classic example of that journey, which is 2013, 2014, I'm taking part in barista competitions and I'm using them as an area to showcase ideas about learn and have this conversation around quality, which at the time there wasn't, I don't, the community wasn't as big, there wasn't as many other opportunities to do that and coffee competitions were really good for that. And so what I would do is I'd be pushing boundaries at my shop of like how to serve coffee or prepare coffee and I'm on this learning journey and I'm sharing it with customers and I'm stumbling it across challenges and one of those as at the time I was a multi-roaster cafe is, you know, I'm getting new coffee in all the time from well-known roasters and individuals around the world and sometimes I'm like, it's tastes great and other times I'm like, this isn't so great. This problem exists today, right? Everyone has this and then you're going, okay, is it me and often the blame game in why a coffee is good or bad is a perspective thing and certain individuals based on their prior experience will be more likely to lean towards a certain reason. So someone might straight away be like, well, my brewing is brilliant so it's definitely the roaster. Or so at the time I tried everything and I'm generally of the belief that there's a lot on my side with anything I do that I want to check I'm doing it well and I'll figure out if I can make it better first. And so I had this coffee that didn't taste very good. I tried everything. different recipes, different temperatures you know we were in the this age where we look at very specific detail in preparing a cup of coffee, which is really just ground coffee and water, but we will look at the birds. We will look at the refractometer reading, look at all of these different variables. And this was 2013-14, and I sent the coffee back to the roaster, and I said, "Oh, at the time I knew, and I definitely know now as a roaster, that it's a horrible thing to receive a client saying, "Look, we just think the coffee's not very good." And I sent the coffee to them, and they took her a few days and came back to me and said, "Thanks for sending it back, Maxwell. We appreciate your feedback. We've been brewing the coffee here, and we think it tastes good." So I'm like, "Hmm, okay. It would be easy to put this down to. Well, we don't agree. You think it's good. I don't think it's good." But I tasted coffee with some of those people quite recently. I'd actually done like a few grader. I think I did the first one in the UK in 2011, and I'd also been at their grocery tasting some coffee, and I thought, "I think if we were in the same room, I think we would probably agree." So what is different between our two experiences? It's the same bag of coffee. The equipment set up is pretty similar. The numbers are all quite similar. And at the time, the one piece of data that we shared, the one brewing recipe parameter that I had a few questions about, was the water. Now, at the time, people did discuss water, but very briefly, and they used an ionic conductivity meter, which is like a 20-pound little device that measures the movement of ions. So basically, the movement of metals, salts in water, the more there are in the water, the more movement there is. So a hard water has more ions in it, gives you a higher reading. And so effectively, people talked about this number. They said, "Oh, my water is 150." Because the SCA specification at the time had a recommended TDS target, to be fair to the SCA, they also had other targets in their specification. But it seemed like because people could buy this device, that's the one they focused on measuring. Anyway, our numbers were quite close, a little bit different. And my question was quite simple. There's some stuff in this water. There's a similar amount in their water in London and a similar amount in my water and bath, but is it the same stuff? Is it the same minerals? And then Chris walked into the shop and he was a customer at the time finishing his PhD, but he was a bit of an unusual PhD student. He'd already published like seven papers. He was a very gregarious outgoing guy and he loved coffee. I pulled him to one side and said, "Hey, Chris, what do you think about this?" And I said, "Okay, from the whole story, I just gave you." And I said, "This is how I'm measuring the water." And he was like, "Huh, is this how people think about water? They just use this device." And he started to list all of the reasons that device was insufficient to understand the water. He didn't use that wording. So this then tumbled into this project where a lot of the roasters were happy to send us water that they were using. We go up to Bath University and we publish this paper. So at this stage, there's no book, right? This is all academic research and I was using my barista competition as a way to explore that idea and try and present it on stage, which is very hard. I always, as you can tell, with the amount I like to talk, it was always hard for me to squeeze what I wanted to say into 15 minutes on stage while I was giving people time to drink coffee. But we did that. We published a paper called The Roll of the Soul Catering Coffee Extraction in an American journal that Journal of Agricultural Food Science. I presented my work on the stage in Rimini at the World Breast Championship and people loved it. People reacted really well to it. I didn't win, unfortunately, but I looked back on it and think maybe that wasn't such a bad thing. But what I noticed was people had really latched on to something in the paper, which was magnesium. The thing about any study, whether it's experimental or conceptual, so this paper was a mathematics paper. So physically, it was just about looking at the mass of binding energy and minerals to certain coffee compounds as opposed to physically doing tests in a lab, right? It was what's called a computational chemistry paper. So the problem with coffee in general and scientifically studying it is there's just so many variables all interacting at once. It's crazy, really. Different cultivars, different species, different ages from harvest, different processing, different fermentation, different roasts, different waters, different temperatures, different brew recipes, different grinders. It's just nuts, like the number of variables is just insane. And so that makes it very hard to study. So whenever you do study something, you would never get a paper published that tried to pull all that together. So you have to create a very specific question that you can reasonably answer from a scientific point of view. The problem with that is it's like looking at a map through a straw. You miss a lot. You prove something exists or maybe exists. This is the problem. When one person does a scientific paper, that doesn't mean it definitely happens. It depends on the results and how conclusive they are. But it often suggests there might be something that's worth exploring. More and then if you see two, three, four more papers on it, you can sort of have a start to have more faith that that thing really does exist and that science understands it well. Anyway, I know you asked me about why I write a book, but we will get there in a second, which is people read the paper. And because it was very narrow, they took a learning from it, which is reasonable. But we very quickly notice like, huh, well, arguably the most important aspect of water science, especially practically in people's taps and water filters is not magnesium and calcium. It is a bicarbonate buffering capacity. And that's not in that paper. That's not what that paper is about. And then we started to discuss other aspects of water and coffee. And me and Chris said, look, we think that this paper needs to be the beginning of a larger body of research and information that tells a more complete story about water science and coffee because we think this paper is misleading. So to your original question, there was a real reason to write it, right? Which is we were concerned that the paper we had written was potentially misleading and that there was a lot of larger context about water and coffee that wasn't out there or understood. So the book's ambition was to just try and improve that conversation. Even more in book two than book one, I'm saying, look, this is a subject that it's very hard to be conclusively right about. And there's lots of questions. But the book was to try and improve that conversation. And I gave a talk, I remember at Symposium before it became Rico for the SCA in Seattle. And it was to say I was competing that year as well. But actually, my highlight wasn't competing on stage. It was giving this talk at Symposium. And it went really well. It was 15 minute talk. And Michael Phillips came up to me afterwards and he said, you know, Max, your talk was really good. But you essentially just pointed out lots of problems. Do you have any solutions? You know, fair enough. But no, that's not what this project is about. I'm not here to tell someone what the right water is. That seems absurd to me. But I'm hoping that through collaboration and publishing and whether it's papers or books, we can just improve the general understanding of this part of coffee that has not been very well understood. And also, like you said earlier, it's easy to forget. We wanted to put a spotlight on this part of coffee making to give it an appropriate level of importance in how we understand every cup of coffee we drink. From that perspective, I think book one was absolutely a success. Excellent. You hit on something, I think, that's important to note here. And that is a great answer to Michael Phillips's observation about pointing out the issues, which originally you said it leaves you with more questions and answers sometimes when you're discussing something like this, which it's a helpful tension to have. Tension is actually part of what helps us grow. And it helps us contextualize information, whereas if you had, and you could have on the stage of either the stage of a book or the stage of a competition, use that platform to give people what they wanted, which was, this is the filter system you should use. This is the water you should use for all coffee at all times. You could have done that. And people would have gladly said, yes, that's what we will do. But it seems like that's already what people were doing. And that was the problem is that we have one type of water. You originally said, this coffee doesn't taste right because you thought, I'm doing all the right things. So it seems like by helping people undo their assumptions about something that contributes so majorly to coffee and putting them in an uncomfortable place, it forces them to have to study it for themselves a little bit more. Completely. And even in a different way, as a community, I think improve the understanding of each other, right? So what I mean by that is we are an industry that's about, for better or worse, coffee moves to lots of different hands. And every cup of coffee is different partnerships and collaborations. And those interactions are often talking about how something tastes, you know, like some coffee grown in a coffee-producing country, processed, shipped as a green sample, roasted by someone else, and then tasted somewhere else with a different water. And so often, it was not just about saying, hey, what's the solutions to water. It was saying, where are we allocating blame incorrectly when it's actually water, right? I'm not saying I have all the solutions to making water consistent and easy, but actually suddenly you think back on all your understanding about when you say, oh, maybe that coffee wasn't very well processed or maybe they can't roast very well. And you can think back and you go, oh, maybe, maybe all those assumptions that I'd built up on my understanding need a bit of a rethink, right? So this project was very much not just about, you know, I'm absolutely someone who refuses to give a concrete answer when I think one doesn't exist because the world likes one, like, you know, very clear structured answers, and obviously in coffee, people like that, they want you to tell them what's best or correct, and that was one of the things I struggled with on barista gums, and the judges would be like, you need to tie the flavor to this. I'm like, I don't think you can actually do that. So I'm not going to do it, right? I think it's disingenuous. I also just don't think it's very helpful. So the water is so, they're all so interactive. There's a part in the book about the feedback loop. You know, and that's was everyone goes, oh yeah, so water matters a lot, but then when you start to show that how you feel about everything else is tied to water, so how you feel about the roast style. So obviously every roast tree buys some coffee or has a sample, they roast it and they cup it, and they make a decision about the green coffee and the roasted coffee based on that sensory experience. Well, there was another actor in the room, it was the water, you can't separate it. So you then develop roasts approaches that you think are good, also driven by water, you have preferences for green coffee driven by water, you have preferences for brewing recipes and grind and all this, it's very hard to pull it all apart. So how can you properly talk about the complexity of coffee without acknowledging this ingredient, this massive part of it? And I think the reality is it's not about just trying to control water because it's a bit of a difficult beast to control, it's also opening up this conversation about what even is good water, right? So I guess the question is now that there's been so much time to, you know, make these decisions in our cafes and do so with more education from a lot of it, maybe from your book, your first book. We still have these constraints and we still have to factor in a lot of variety that we now have more of today. How much of this environment now that is a little bit more complex to the brewer of coffee had to do you factor into the second book and address in the second book? Yeah, it's a really good question because I believe more than ever, which is yes, we've learnt some certain things, but actually the problems remain the same. And so what are our practical solutions to those problems back to Michael Phillips, the original question. And I think on the one hand, I do some other projects, my main one is a grinding project with a biotech inventor and he's super clever, he's made DNA analyzing machines and we talk a bit about the water problem and he acknowledges how incredibly challenging it is technologically. And I think there are more solutions than ever to treat water in cafes and naturally as the industry cares more about something. Companies see the opportunity to deliver different forms of technology or slightly different approaches because they see people care about it and go, okay, there's commercial opportunity there now. Can we develop a product that solves that issue? But I'm not sure water science from a technology point of view has really come on leaps and bounds in those 10 years to be honest. The biggest change I think is that the middle part of water for coffee one had this chapter on how to make your own water with mineral salts. Now, if we go back 10 years, that was just a cool chapter and in my mind's eye at the time, it was to recreate some waters to do demos and get a feel for different waters. But it's had a whole like of its own and there's people, we started with sachets of minerals being sold. Now that's moved into concentration drops and this whole like built water scene, this idea of building waters with salts has really taken off particularly during COVID and this whole at home movement where a lot of the things that struggle to take off in cafes because they're more commercial have the opportunity to take off at home where the home doesn't have to find a commercial solution and can just sort of tinker. But I firmly believe that the mineral salt approach is not as sophisticated as people like to believe it is and it has some limitations and that's one thing I cover off in this book which is, there's a lot of context here like a lot of coffee in it. When we talk about the industry and fall, it's very hard to sort of categorize things and say this is a correct approach, this is negative process and water is a great example of this which is the reality is most of us have to start with a source water of some kind right. And even if we buy water in that's been distilled, that's still a source water that we're starting with and the reality is when you need to make waters of mineral salt you need to start with water with not much in it so you can have a blank canvas. But actually one of the things I push back on this book is this narrative that's evolved that mineral made waters are the most advanced sophisticated way to approach coffee brewing and you know I've had some arguments and debates on this one because people become very attached the way they do things and I think some of the arguments back are not unjustified but you cannot say a mineral salt water is the same as a naturally occurring water they're just not and I believe that actually one of the issues here was our book because in our attempt to distill down excuse the pun complexity of water we got people to focus on three things we said hey let's just talk about calcium magnesium and put those together as general hardness and then let's talk about alkalinity also known as bicarbonate or buffering. So which is saying look if you're going to get a test done and you get all these different minerals in the water but let's just focus on these three as good indicators for where roughly the water will be and how it will make toffee taste and in many ways I still believe that to be useful from book one and in book two I think starting with those simple measurements is actually a very good way to understand most waters however it's obviously limited there's all of these other compounds in the water and typically our paper the role of dissolved cations is about cations it's not about anions at all so every water needs both it needs a plus a cation and a minus an anion so you would always have to have the two together and salts are a great example of that calcium chloride is the cation of calcium and the anion of chloride so you can't put the calcium in or you can't put the magnesium into the water without putting something else in and the most common salts are always the same two anions minus a few exceptions but it's generally sulfates and chlorides so when you make a water you end up with a lot of sulfates and chlorides now if you were to go and take a naturally occurring water they rarely have a lot of those so there's a distinct difference between manufactured or built waters and naturally occurring waters is that the naturally occurring often have a much wider spread of minerals there's a lot more right because obviously when you make your water just with magnesium sulfate that's a bit of an abnormal water there's there's just magnesium and sulfate in there there's not a lot else in there right and so actually the bit that started to make me question this was I was doing an aeropress judging competition in Belgium and the cool thing about an aeropress competition is it's all the same coffee provided to all the competitors they've all got the same brewing device so really they're just playing around with the grinder the water and that's become a big part of aeropress comps and brewing competitions and you know then technique like temperature and you know maybe maybe they um separate the coffee out at the beginning and stuff but I was tasting these coffees the same again and these big strong tastes like dry metallic sharp sourdough and the brewer would come up to me afterwards and say hey what did you think of my brew and I'd be like did you use a lot of magnesium sulfate and they would like really excitedly tell me how they'd read water for coffee one and they and they put all of this magnesium sulfate in there and I'm like I think you've just put way too much in first of all and it's a very strong taste and you wouldn't have huge amounts of magnesium in naturally occurring water you'd have a small amount so we've got this new world with these built waters it's not like people have taken control of water through mineral salts we've got a new world of very high amounts of certain minerals that we never used to really taste in coffee right so I started to question this and be like okay are people putting a lot more of mineral in which is a new taste and also is a naturally occurring balance of you know let's say you had 30 milligrams of magnesium in one water and which was made manually by a human with salts and one that was in a bottle from a natural source my question is how different are they and I think what this says to us is look magnesium and calcium matter but the other anions matter too and that's why they taste different okay and so then on this journey I start coming around to this experience of tasting lots of coffee with lots of water again which obviously I did for book one book two and lots in between and in my experience you know these tests you can argue about them and do your own tests but for me there is a difference and very often I would pick the naturally occurring water over the manual water now this all depends on what new values so there's a friend of mine in cup of excellence and I think this is how you know people feel about intensity versus complexity like often some people like very intense flavors which a lot of experimental process are good at delivering and like nuance complex clean fluorocoffees are not that bad and I think the same with water right chuck these minerals in they will spike the acid and you will suddenly get more acid and if that's what you're after it's a self-confirming loop you're like oh I put some minerals in and I got a positive flavor that I like so minerals are good right so now I'm going to make all my water with mineral salts I also believe there's a false sense of control which is you added the mineral salt and you manipulated the flavor of the drink and you're you then made the logical which I believe is not a valid logical jump that oh okay I can make I'm in full control of water with mineral salts and I can I don't need to look at natural waters anymore I found the world with mineral salts and the world is my oyster I can add all these different salts and get all these different results and I think what I'm trying to say in the book and also my changing opinion on this topic is yes mineral salts allow you to play but they like to play within a box of results right within an arena of high chlorides and high sulfates now there will be some people who come back to you and say look well of course max you shouldn't use loads of them and you should always try and use a good mix but even to try and go and mimic natural water is so much harder than people think like try and do it go and try and get a bottled water and then go and make one that has the exact same spread anyway I've got a good example of this, which is we supply some expensive coffee pods to a mission star restaurant. It's a gay share and, you know, high scoring coffees from well-known producers. And I turned up to give a chat about our coffee. And the head bartender, who's, you know, a cocktail bartender, but had a passion for coffee, he said to me, "Oh, what do you do for water in your coffee shop in London?" And I started to explain. And he sort of derisively said, "Oh, you don't make your water." As in, like, "How good are you?" He didn't know my background. He didn't know I'd written water for coffee. But it was super interesting that we've got to this stage where made water is seen as the sort of most sophisticated superior way to do it. And I think made water is a solution, but not always the best solution. My point to him and the point I've been exploring is that actually naturally occurring water within appropriate filtration system may be better or at least as good. And I think a lot of people are not exploring that option enough. So although I've spent a lot of time questioning, like, the true application limitation of made water, mineral salt made water, I would like to point out there are clearly examples where it does work as a great solution, especially where the water you're starting with is very problematic. So if you have very soft starting water and the coffee is thin and quite flat and a little bit sour, adding some mineral salts suddenly helps bring that to life. And so I think what I'm saying is mineral salts can be a positive part of a particular drink, especially when the starting water is not what you want. But if the starting water is what you want naturally, then actually give that some time and explore it. So there is absolutely application for mineral salts and lots of places. And also, let's put the two together and naturally occurring water that's got a nice blend of minerals with a few salts added. So it's definitely a very complex conversation, but I'm trying to sort of reignite that idea that nature's water is often worth looking at and that the made waters have a place and can be a part of solutions or exploration. But I think we need to think about the two and what they have strengthened. Well, hey, everybody. It's Chris. I wanted to take a break here and talk about our sponsors today because I love both of their products and I want you to experience them for yourself. So first, go on Instagram and follow Arto Brick. It's at Arto Brick out of LA. They take stones and they turn them into beautiful things. I mean, it's basically how do you put it? They manufacture their own tiles, hard surfaces, the stone and tile work that they do for cafes and residential properties is amazing. If you've got an idea in your head about what you want your coffee shop to look like, the floors, the backsplash, the walls, whatever it is that you can think of stonework and tiles and hard surfaces, this is the company that you need to put on that list of vendors and collaborators with you in your project. So go check them out. The website is Arto.com but better yet go to Instagram @ArtoBrick. Now, we're also sponsored today by our friends at the Pacific Marista series. So if you go to PacificFoodService.com, that page is going to show you all that have to offer the extensive lineup of plant-based beverages that supply your customers with a product that stands up to the heat from seaming. It has great texture and it keeps the balance of the beverage where it should be for a really satisfying experience. And you can't say that for every plant-based beverage out there, but Pacific has been doing this long enough to know their audience and just test their products against the tastes and knowledge of professional baristas. It's made for them and that's why it is such a standard in our industry. So again, PacificFoodService.com get samples and try it for yourself. If you're looking for the best plant-based beverages for your customers, then look for the Barista series from Pacific. Now back to our episode with Maxwell Dashwood. As you're saying this, in talking about the issues that come up with, first of all, we come up with a lot of issues, I guess, even when we have answers and we can complicate something and make it all about that. So back to the idea of, I think we're missing the nuance here. So it's become that comment while you don't build your water. Well, that sounds like the time now is to throw in some disruption to that thinking because it's not as nuanced as it could be. And so the idea of having built waters wherein it might be good to a certain degree seems like it could also really cause us to lose sight of other factors that contribute to a coffee's quality. We shouldn't blame the roaster just as much as we shouldn't necessarily always blame the water because if your goal is to take what might be a badly roasted coffee, and they do exist and create water to make up for the lack of development in a coffee, isn't that a factor that we have to consider? Absolutely, but I would take your point and expand upon it and say that for me personally, one of my pushback on the high edition of mineral salts is I see them in a slightly similar way to the high intervention, flavoring of coffees at the processing level, which is, for example, you've got these very sophisticated, and they're clever, and these sophisticated processing techniques, I believe there's a lot of misinformation out there like, you know, co-firm and this and thermic shock that, and the names don't reflect what's actually happening to flavor that coffee, but you would go with, however you feel about these particular processes, they have a very strong flavor, and it's interesting, and it's potent, and it plays to especially coffees desire for intense fruity flavors that stand out of the cup, right? So it plays to intensity, and so if I have four cultivars or four varieties with that process, I can't taste it, I can't taste gaysia when it's processed like that, it all tastes like soap to me. So now, am I saying that flavor profile is wrong? No, would I argue to all my faces, till I'm red in the face, that it covers up provenance of the cultivar? Yes, I would. I would say the same thing about adding minerals to water, which is very quickly you have flavored the coffee with salts, and you cannot taste the cultivar and the nuance and the provenance as easily. And this is the same across the world of coffee, like you come up with a brewing style, right? Like a really short, sticky approach to espresso. Will that express the characteristic of the coffee as much? No, is it valid? Yes, but you need to know what you're doing when you develop that brewing style. The same with roasting, like is darker roast coffee bad? No, is it objectively going to a certain dark roast covering up more of that complex nuance of the coffee? Yes, that's not supposed to say it's bad, but it is doing that thing. I would say the same with adding minerals to water, which is your point of like making a worst coffee taste better. Fine, but I think you can take a really great coffee, not taste like itself anymore, it just tastes like the water you like to use, and all the coffee tastes the same. And so, yeah, I think these conversations about at what point, I mean, from a brewing cut point of view, that acid that, you know, people put citrate in waters and citrate, a lot of people would say, oh, but doesn't it deprotonate and become alkaline? No, it absolutely will display as an acid. So, it's a flavour, right? So, you know, if you add magnesium citrate, you're going to add some citrate flavour aspect to that drink. And I think it's interesting, it's a very interesting blurred line between having control over your water, to the water actually being part of a flavouring of the coffee, right? Yeah, that flavouring agent part, the way you put it, it's like we used to be maybe snobby about, well, don't put sugar in your coffee, it masks the flavour, but so we said salt instead, it's a classic mistake in cooking. Oops. But yes, the question then becomes one of practicality where just because, you know, like Jurassic Park, you could, doesn't mean you should, and we have done so much to curate the way that we present our coffees in the cafe. And I wonder what your opinion on this is, should we put limitations on our ability to experiment with water within the cafes, because it does impact the way that we roast, we cup the coffees with this water, we pull the espresso, we make the pour overs, but then the customer gets the coffee and they bring it to their home. How closely should we be matching the way we produce our water, or control our water in the cafes in the quality control process to what the mass, if it's even possible to know, the what the mass of people would be using our coffee at home, the water they're using to make the coffee at home. So these are really good questions, and I think how I feel about this, that even everything we just discussed is all relative to how you're sharing that information, who's using it, and how they're using it, right? So if you know that the water has a strong taste, but you like having salts as part of the result you want to get fine, but if you're saying to someone, hey, this is the best way to showcase a coffee in a training course or something, I think that's where you start to dispute it and go, hmm, there's another story here. And so a lot of it is like what information or what approach to cop water are you sharing, and in what context, if we were to go to the practical issue of this problem that we all have, and this is unique to coffee really. Theoretically, it exists in tea as well, but I'm not sure it's as impactful. So if we look at A lot of other things like bedroom. wine, the water content is in the bottle, you know, it's there. So yes, everyone acknowledges that the water matters, but the brewer made that choice. The brand decided to do the water thing. And so the roast and this is so interesting at coffee, right? Which is like, again, coffee is so unusual because I always talk about, I don't want to go off topic, but I think it's relevant, which is wine is perfect for aggregator businesses. A wine shop is an aggregator of a bunch of different wines from a bunch of different producers. Roasters though are not like a wine shop because they are also part of the making process. So it's like wine meat brewery is kind of like coffee and then the customer though adds the water bit. So they have to prepare it. So you're not buying a finished product. And this is why water is just a nightmare to be honest. This podcast, you know, and talking about the intricacies of water and brewing, I think for most of us working in coffee, water is just annoying. Like it's it's so variable, right? Across the world. And even in our own sites throughout the year, it's just getting in the way of consistency. When you end up discussing mineral salts, you're saying it's a curation and a decision piece. But when we're talking about most people's water that they're using coffee, it's a consistency issue and a benchmarking reference issue, which is to your point, what water does the customer use compared to what the grocery used to, you know, get a nice result in the QC room or the cupping room? Or much more direct example, what does the cafe use at the customer drinks the coffee in every day, then buys the bag off the shelf, goes home and tries to replicate the drink they had in the cafe, you know, they either become absolutely fascinated by it all and read everything. All they are, this is a nightmare and just go back to instant coffee or something that is more predictable. So I think conceptually to your question, I don't have a clear answer on that one. My approach, I like to taste my coffee across different waters. Rosaries have this very interesting challenge that they prepare something meticulously in their environment, their manufacturing environment and water is obviously part of what they consider. And then they taste that coffee and they say, we're happy with it. This is the way we brew it and this is the water we used. Now, as is the way with all brewing in a QC lab for a grocery, there's a danger that you end up going down such a specific niche way of brewing that your customers can't replicate it. And it doesn't matter whether it tasted good for you. It's not going to taste good for most of your customers, right? And you know, same with grinding, right? If everybody's using grinders that create a lot of heat damage and smashing and then you have like a roller grinder, it's not very useful to test your product on that roller grinder when none of your customers are using it. The same goes with water. Now, when we see some roasters take this approach of trying to be very prescriptive with water and it's challenging, you know, they go, okay, by, so if you go down the mineral salt route, go yet by like a zero water jug to filter the water down to a very small amount of minerals, because that's a dionizing resin in there and then add some mineral salts. And this is, again, this is the appeal of mineral salts. It is more repeatable in many environments as long as you can start, get some distilled water, right? The other way you could talk about it is locality. So, you know, if coffee should taste good in a certain location and maybe people should buy more coffee locally, where their water's similar to that of the roast tree. However, the truth is the roasts of rarely use is tap water, especially in a hard water area, right? They have softened the water down. But you look at the whole water discussion in areas of the world where water's quite good for brewing coffee, just out the tap, which is, you know, pretty soft. We need to come back to the soft bit here because one of the big bits of water for coffee, too, is concentration, beverage concentration. This is a really key point. Most of what I'm talking about now is filter coffee. And there's this problem that we discuss water by the liter. We say 30 milligrams a liter of this ion. We say 40 milligrams of that ion. We say a PPM and overall PPM. It's all per liter of water. But when you make a cup of coffee, you don't use a liter of water and actually espresso and filter are opposites. So let's say we make two drinks. We make a filter coffee, start with 15 grams of coffee. And we also brew an espresso with 15 grams of coffee. So the starting amount of coffee is identical in both beverages. But when we make the filter coffee, let's say we use 250 mill of water. Now, but arguments say, let's say the water was 40 milligrams of bicarbonate per liter. By brewing 250 grams, we've actually only used 10 milligrams of bicarbonate in the actual drink, right? Because we're not using a full liter of water. We're using a fourth of a liter, which means we've got a fourth of the minerals. So all of the minerals we say per liter, what minerals actually end up in the cup? So let's say it's 10 milligrams for the filter coffee. Then we go and we make the espresso and let's say we use 50 mill of water to make the espresso. Well, that's a fifth again. So now we're only down to 2 milligrams of bicarbonate in the espresso. So the coffee's the same. So the rough amount of acid in both drinks is similar. There are some differences depending on preparation, but the bulk of it is the same. And so if bicarbonate pushes back against acid, in the espresso, by reducing the water, you reduce the buffering. Theoretically, this is the opposite of what you would like. Because in espresso is a concentrate, so perceived acid is higher than the filter coffee. And this plays out when you look at people's preferences. Very commonly, just anecdotally through experience, people will prefer softer waters for filter coffee and harder waters for espresso. And it makes absolute sense. And in foot one, we didn't put any of that in. We just talked about water by the liter. Same way, SCA does, same way everyone does. And I think that's because most of the world of coffee's conversation around coffee is all driven by filter coffee, because it's all driven by cupping. And it creates some like fundamental context that we're missing. And this is a great example of this, not great for espresso equipment, particularly. That's a different challenge about maintenance. But you'd be surprised how hard a water can taste very nice for espresso. It'd be very surprised. Well, it makes you wonder how much we've been missing out on and how many customers have developed these defense mechanisms against improperly extracted or less than ideally extracted espresso, where we see the ever growing popularity of the condiment bar as sort of fix it afterwards, like I said, defense against what they perceive as the espresso is really not that great. It could be better if we were focused on it. And it is still such a large part of our menu. I don't know if it applies also to since we're talking about concentration called brew as well. I'm not sure what the if there's a correlation. No, it's a really great question. I can't say I've done enough work on it. But I've had this question from someone else. I'm like, yeah, that makes complete sense. Is the context is key and absolutely water is just like roast, just like we say, Hey, like we did this instant coffee with hasty and Canada. And I think they've got some of the best instant processing around. And you know, you roast it so much lighter, you would just never pass the roast through QC through your normal preparation. And the same with pods and everything, which is these rules we create are in certain contexts, you change the context, what works changes, like absolutely, whether it's the brewing method, the format, you know, whether it's cold, water or hot water, all of these things, right? Because if water interacts with the perception of acid and the end beverage, and then the temperature changes, that absolutely. We had one of the questions in the book, me and Chris, I said to Chris, like, some often this book took so long to write because we would read another paper and some of these papers were not new. They were old, like from the 80s. And there was one paper saying that actually the way the water behaves does change at temperature. So actually the interaction between the temperature of the water and the mineral composition of it does change. So actually, then you start to go, hang on a minute. So if the water is sat in a boiler at a high temperature for a long time, does Jack change the composition? And does it matter how long it sat at that temperature? If it goes up to that temperature for one second and comes back down, is that the same change versus leaving? These are really interesting questions. And actually, we talk about this in the beginning of the book, just about scientific principles of equilibrium, which is normally when you look at a scientific phenomena, you say, if you let the process or the reaction take place all the way to equilibrium, it would result in this particular result. But when we brew coffee, we aren't letting things go to equilibrium. We're stopping along the journey of interaction from a scientific point of view, right? This is all very complicated. And what we're trying to say is there are questions that we don't have answers to. There is definitely more study to be done. And yes, we need to be clear with water that we don't understand it fully. There are more questions to be had. And we should think carefully about these things, rather than thinking like, yeah, we've figured water out, you add some magnesium salt and bobs your uncle. It's definitely not that simple. There's way more nuance there. And I just want to go back to your question that I never properly answered, because I don't think there's a clear answer to it, which is as a roaster, you could either try your best to understand how your coffee is going to taste with loads of different waters. And then I believe you could roast coffee and prepare coffee in a way that tastes good in lots of environments. And the danger of a lot of roasteries is they end up only tasting on one grinder with one water. But can you roast something that tastes good with all waters? No. And to your point before, should a cafe be having different waters for every coffee to maximize them? These are all interesting questions. And you have to end up, I think, somewhere, which is like a pragmatic, reasonable solution. So if you look at my cafe, I have a cartridge system on the espresso bar, which purposefully is opened up on the bypass to have a pretty hard water for espresso in my shops. And then it's also like how do you brew coffee? Like I do turbo shots and I think harder water is really beneficial for a turbo shop. So how do you separate all these things out, right? But then you go to the filter bar and we're using an RO system and filtering that water right down to about 50 ppm. We're not adding any minerals, we're just using an RO system with our source water. But it means on the bar we've got softer water for filter and harder water for espresso. And to your point earlier, I think that is a much more reasonable approach to having different waters for different applications. To go a step further and say okay, on the freezer menu, we've got a different water solution for every single coffee on the freezer menu. Is that necessary? Is the question, it's interesting for sure, I'm not sure it's necessary. And I think the reality for a lot of us in coffee with our businesses and our programs, is we have to fix some variables at some point. And I think fixing variables that most of the time promote the qualities you believe are good. Like I've always said that I'm like a chef, right? In my shops, I'm the chef and we buy the coffees I like. And if I don't like something, it comes off the menu. That's not the only way to do it. Each roastery in each shop is is its own chef, right? So yeah. But what I'm looking to do with water is to generally think about water to go down the road of the kind of flavors I like. Could I go a step further and every coffee that comes in tweaked the water for it? Yes. How much reward do I think you get from that? Not as much as maybe, I still think it's worth it. That's a great way to put it. And that's kind of what I wanted to talk about as we round off our conversation here was the, you know, the framework and the approach that one who who presents coffee to the public should take. And it's really helpful to, you know, accept those limitations into just kind of think about the different sections of the bar. We always recommend people have that back bar different filtration system for that than the espresso machine gets its own thing because it is its own thing. And from there, you can kind of ask the question, what's the downstream impact and experience in if you've accepted that the answer is what you want, then at least you've been intentional about your decisions rather than assumptive, which I think is really all you could ask if you've got the information yet at the end of the day, you're making better decisions with more information, but you're making decisions nonetheless. Well, I think this happens in coffee all the time. You go on this journey to look at all these variables and you try and do a good analysis of like, okay, how do we want to brew coffee? And then it's up to review. You make the best decision you can make at that time, which you feel is informed and is good solution for what you're trying to achieve, right? And then if there's a reason to rethink that, you can go, yeah, okay, let's rethink it. And I think in water, that's happening regularly. I think my push back on some of the mineral solution ideas is that there may be not as optimal. And actually, some people could be brewing really great tasty coffee with their tap water just filtered with the right system. And in a way, I'm not saying anything, you know, this is what water companies have been saying for years and yes, which is let's look at the water you've got with. And then you know, because all the water companies have all these different filters, right? You might look at them and be like, why do you got so many different filters? It's like, because people have so many different waters. It's definitely trying to get the best out of the water that you have. But I had another idea when you were talking just there about behavior. So what I'm interested in generally is the limit of what a coffee company can do to curate the behavior of the customer. So this is a really interesting idea to me. Someone will say, we don't talk to customers enough about X. And I'm like, sure, so where do you sell your coffee? Now, if you sell your coffee on a retail shelf, how much conversation can you have? So the reality, a lot of the time is you're not there to tell the customer what to do. Now, certain brands will be in a better position to, you know, they've either got like a real strong community or their customers really ask them what to do. And they will be able to give more advice. But what I'm trying to say is, let's say you designed this idea where you said, okay, we want to tell all of our customers to buy the ionized water and add these mineral salts to this concentration and brew the coffee in this way. How many actually do that? Right? It's a nice theory if all the customers did what you told them to do. Exactly. Really, let's say you live in a really hard water area. And most of your customers are using pretty hard water to make your coffee. You have two options. There are more options than two, but for the sake of this particular example, you could use really, really soft water like 20 ppm and roast a bit darker. But most people who are buying your coffee are actually using 400 ppm water and need the opposite. They need a lighter roast, right? So, I think in that scenario, which one would you go for? And I'm generally in favour with lots of things in coffee of finding something that is more likely to taste good most of the time, rather than something that could taste great, but hardly any of the time. And it's the same with the argument around sustainability and recycling cups, you know, if it requires a bunch of behavioral adoption, it's probably not a very good idea. And it's sort of like, where can you meet the customer in the middle where you can kind of guess how they're going to behave. And then it's your job to be like, okay, well, if we think people are going to make it like this, it's a bit like me. I, for years, I like immersion brews where I grind really coarse to get close to the cupping table. And then I come to realisation that 90% of the people buying my coffee on my website are making a pour over with a fine grind. So they're not getting the result I get at all. And actually, I've gone back to drawing board and changed the way we do things to try and get a better result in that situation as well. I think water is a great example of that. It requires the same approach. Yeah, well said. And I feel like that gives people a lot of an understanding of how to think about the end user, how to think in a balanced way about their own participation in the rendering of the final product, which has upstream impact, downstream however you want to say it for the entire industry back to the way we started this conversation talking about actors that act upon the coffee, water being one of them. And of course, us being the people that curate these experiences. And so I'm thankful that we got an opportunity to just kind of discuss the tip of the iceberg here, which of course is the book itself that's coming out very soon here. Would you tell us where we can go to learn more about it when it's come out and how we can purchase it? Yeah, sure. So I mean, hopefully it'll be everywhere. But in the short term, there's my book website, MaxwellDashrod.com. Scott Reo, who helped me publish the first book, he's going to have several hundred copies in the US, hopefully before Christmas. I think really depending on it's all about how the copies make their way around the world and how quickly they do it. But the book should really be out by the end of this month into December. And you can find it in North America with Scott in Canada with eight ounce. I think we're going to have more and more partners who are interested in getting hold of the book. Or you can buy it directly from me at MaxwellDashrod.com. You know, I think the book is still very scientific like the first book. I mean, Chris is my co-author. But I think it's much more about science and coffee. And water as a subject is one that I think is going to continue to be important. And we just hope that our second book, like the first one, is a positive part of that conversation that it contributes to people's understanding of water. But I think there's still a lot to think about and a lot to discover. And it will be very interesting in ten years time to see how the coffee industry is looking at water and how we're behaving around it. Maxwell, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. I appreciate the approach you have to coffee and these ideas. We need to be talking constantly and collaborating to create better ideas, to create better coffee. So in you're doing great work in that field. So thank you. That's a pleasure. Thank you very much. I actually had a question quickly about the, when we were just discussing then the idea of how a roastery could think about water, I was doing it in quite a binary way of either all your coffee goes this way or all your coffee goes that way. But a bit like the mineral salt solutions where you say here's one for traditional flavor profile. You know, I don't know if anyone's done it, but that is another interesting way for a roaster to do things right, which is to roast the coffee for harder or softer water. Yeah. Maybe some some roasters do it without putting it on the bag, right, which is saying, okay, here's the house copy that we think gets used. Let's say you roast in a hard water area. We're like a lot of people buy this. They're not going to use filtered water. So that is the other way to do it is to sort of, you know, not go all down one route with one approach to water, but have a variety of coffee products that could deal with different waters. I really appreciate that. You know, a long time ago, I was in the training lab of coffee roaster out in Brooklyn or Queens. And this is going to be 15 years ago or so, but they had large wholesale clients that they needed to make happy and they had three full espresso bars built in their roastery that mimicked exactly the water and the machinery of that bar that their customers used because they want the testing and the quality control to be mimicked exactly to what these pretty big wholesale customers want. And that's a bit extreme and it's not in the budget for most people to do. However, the point is, yeah, maybe that roastery could have these different contexts knowing a lot about their customers. It is maybe just a form of hospitality and the form of crafting coffee. No, absolutely. And I think this is the challenge we all have as businesses, right? And this is the same for getting about water. It's the same with cafes, roasteries, farmers. You ultimately have to choose your customer to a degree and you can't please all customers. And I think that example is a great one, which is your big customers are naturally going to be the most important. So it makes sense to mimic their water. But yeah, you may have a smaller customer who doesn't have that exact environment. And I think that is just one of the challenges of coffee where we all want every customer to be happy. But you know, there will be limitations to how we can replicate experiences. But this is an ongoing challenge for coffee. and water is definitely still part of that conversation. I think at the beginning of this conversation, you said to me, you know, it's just so easy to forget about water. And even now, for me, I can spend a couple weeks thinking about other stuff in coffee and then have to be like, "Oh, yeah, I think it's actually just the water." So it's like, it's something we probably always need. It's almost like having an alarm on your phone that comes on and says, "Just remember the water." Ah, yes. That's a practical way to do. I love it. Yeah. Thank you, Maxwell. Okay, everybody. Well, I hope that you enjoyed that conversation. One of the great things about this was just this circling back to and this idea of what are we doing this for? Like, who are we doing this for? We know we can make coffee very complex and complicated and sometimes to the detriment of the coffee itself and a lot of times for the customer, it becomes impossible for them to experience the coffee that we do because we're not focused on the water enough. We're not focused on maybe the ways that the water isn't sufficient or maybe we're focusing on the water to the degree that it's masking what the coffee is actually capable of. And we're talking a lot about built waters or over using magnesium and overusing different drops and powders and things. So this is a huge issue, I think, in the industry and that seeks to have a customer connect with a coffee. And if you take anything from this today, one, I think you should take the idea that there's a lot to learn and we should pursue learning to make a decision based on the knowledge that you acquire and knowing who that knowledge is supposed to be benefiting the most and how that knowledge produces the most good. And then three, I think is that we need to make a decision, you know, this idea of what we're going to do with our coffee has to be based on our context and who's drinking it. So look at your local context and say, how can I make the most people successful with this coffee? And what is the water doing to adjust the way I roast the way I promote the brewing parameters for this coffee? We talked about the ratio of brew extraction or the density of the extraction espresso versus filter, for example, I thought that was great that we brought that into the conversation. So this is what it's about. Read the book, water for coffee, go to maxwell-wood.com or you can find it on Scott Reo's website or eight ounce coffee in Canada. Basically go and find this book and get plugged into where you can purchase it when it comes out. Probably not going to last very long. So I know I'm going to be hedging for my coffee here somehow. But go and check that out and a huge thank you to maxwell for being on the show and inspiring us once again to think deeply about coffee so that we can enjoy that coffee all the more. If you have questions for me about today's episode or any other content on the show, go ahead and email Chris at keys to the shop.com. That's also where you can reach out to inquire about consulting and coaching. We have lots of services around those two subjects of consulting and coaching so don't hesitate to reach out. You can also stay aware of our webinar that's coming up in December and we're going to be running more of those throughout 2026. But this is our first webinar launching in December. Space is limited. So check it out in the show notes. You're going to find links there and that is going to be it for today's episode. Thank you everybody for joining me. As usual, I so appreciate you supporting the show with your listening and sharing and all the other stuff you do to help make it possible. So thank you and I hope that this episode has truly given you keys to the shop.