WILD Water

Welcome to 2019!

Wow. What a year 2018 was. For our first year in business, it was pretty WILD. We definitely named our business appropriately. I wonder if we had named it "The Calm Way" things would have been a bit more....tame. Guess we'll never know. Luckily we wouldn't change our name, or the road we're on, for anything.  

We met so many awesome people over the last year. 2018 was one for the books. 

​Now, as we start 2019, I wanted to write about the same thing I wrote about in 2018 - water. 

Water! (The stuff that jon is obsessed with)

In case you want to revisit the posts about water in 2018, I've provided links below. 
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Top two are definitely An Ion Took a Compound on a Date and #MakeScienceCoolAgain. I got a little nerdy in Into to Total Hardness, so it's probably okay to skip. And we left off with us trying to figure out the water recipe in Dialing in Water? Is That a Thing? It's probably okay to skip too. Abbreviated version, I screwed up the experiment.

So that left us with a few months to figure out the water recipe. I tried a bunch of coffee, and over the course of those couple months, we figured it out. I swear that I have tried so much drip, so many pour-overs, and so many shots of espresso with so many different water combinations that we decided to plan a whole event around water. As if, our obsession wasn't weird enough....

So that's what we're going to do! A water tasting party!  We'll all sit around drinking the same coffee with different water and discuss what makes the difference from cup-to-cup. You'll learn things about water, and coffee, you didn't know you even wanted to know! 

But for real, we're proud of this, and we're excited to share it with you. Drip coffee is 98% water (we did the math this time :) and when it comes to body, sweetness, and flavor, that water is the most important brewing factor.

Here's the link for the event details. It's a free event, but we need you to sign up because there are limited seats.

Water for coffee

In case you feel like making your own water for coffee, I wanted to detail out the process we took to develop ours. It took me summoning all of little Freshman Jon's chemistry knowledge. Mostly acid/base equilibria, but a little bit of thermodynamics as well. If you don't feel like making your own water for coffee, Christine and I are going to sell some in the shop. You're always welcome to stop by and grab some. 

How to do this at home

There are a few different way to do this. The first, somewhat more challenging way, is to learn everything that you can. Like...EVERYTHING. Christine calls this, "the Jon way". Reading things from the experts is the best way to start this process.
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There are a bunch of good resources online. Start here. It's a talk by Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood. It gives the story behind the science.

Then, I'd suggest reading all our crazy blogs from last year about water. (Yes, even the ones I said weren't important to read above). 

THEN, move onto these: 
Dissolved Minerals in Water and Their Effect on Coffee
The Science of Finding the Perfect Water for Coffee

And finally, when you think you've read enough about water....read this book, Water for Coffee, written by the expert Dr. Christopher Hendon. It sits atop our little bookshelf in the trailer. You're always welcome to come stop by and read it. 

You can also see the paper behind the book published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry,- Hendon et al., 2014. 

Now, the second method, is the "Christine Method".
It is much more efficient.
Like....much, much more efficient. 

Here it is: grab some epsom salt, baking soda, and a white lab coat (that's just for show) and try out these recipes. Make some coffee with it. You're done. You're an expert. 

Christine Method Resources:
​Barista Hustle Water Recipe
DIY Water Recipes: The World in Two Bottles
White lab coat 
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Whichever method you choose, just enjoy it. Enjoy the process. Try. Fail. Try again. Fail again. Drink a beer. Try again. And if you need help, you know where to find us. 

See you on the 19th! 

Here is the link again for the Water Cupping.  We will go through our process, taste some coffees, learn about water, and answer any questions you may have.

If you can't make it to the event, we will start selling our "Wild Water" in mason jars at the shop. So you can brew coffee at home with our special water. 
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Kansas City, thank you so much for letting us serve you in 2018. It has been amazing. 

And to my sweet wife - Christine thank you for allowing me to turn a coffee shop into a chemistry lab. Thank you for empowering my passions and dreams and finding ways for them to grow symbiotically with yours. Thank you for letting me obsess, just a little bit, about water. And thank you for being you.