One Reason Melbourne’s Coffee Is the Best? Our Tap Water

At her venues Calere and Chiaki, Alicia Feng celebrates coffee. “Coffee is an amazing drink,” she says. “First of all, it connects people. I think that’s the thing I enjoy the most: it connects me to a lot of different people that I learn so much from and who inspire me a lot. Coffee has so much to offer – a lot of stories and varieties.”

Cafes like Calere show off the work of specialty coffee roasters from around the world, covering the spectrum of flavours and styles that professional baristas can conjure from great beans. Beyond careful sourcing and skilled brewing, though, there’s one critical component of great coffee that often flies under the radar.

“With the water that we use, the hardness and the mineral content are the most important factors when brewing coffee,” Feng says. “It affects extraction – so whatever your coffee tastes like, water will play a big part.”

If you’re a Melbourne local who’s ever travelled interstate or overseas and sipped a glass of tap water, you might have noticed a difference in flavour. Melbourne’s water is remarkably soft, with a low concentration of dissolved minerals compared to other cities around the globe, and it makes a surprisingly big difference to how coffee tastes in the cup. While Feng says the high mineral content in hard water can cover up coffee’s flavours, soft water is more of a blank canvas. “It definitely gives a really good clarity to the coffee, which is what we’re looking for,” she says.

Coffee lovers in Melbourne are lucky to have such clean, naturally balanced water to work with. And for the pro coffee makers, it provides the perfect base to play with more subtle elements. Some minerals can actually be desirable in water when making coffee, Feng says, but they have to be the right ones in the right concentration – you don’t want to roll the dice with hard water. For experts like Feng, the best water for coffee starts out soft, like it is in Melbourne. She adds a blend of minerals, with a blend of minerals added in at the end – generally from a powder or liquid concentrate.

“For shop use,” she says, “a balance of calcium, magnesium and potassium will give you a good base to extract standard coffee, and you can adjust based on that.”

Compared to our hard-water neighbours, Melburnians are blessed with an enviable supply of clean, catchment-protected water. And for Feng, the message is clear: we need to respect and conserve our water, so we can keep enjoying the best coffee in Australia, if not the world.

“Water is so important that we need to pay extreme attention to it,” she says. “It’s a really, really important resource, so how we’re consuming water and not doing harmful things to the Earth is really important.”

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Greater Western Water, Melbourne Water, South East Water and Yarra Valley Water.