Brita’s David Sayes talks about the power of water
Brita’s David Sayes says that café owners aren’t thinking enough about the water that can make or break their business.
David Sayes thinks a lot about water. He talks a lot about water, learns a lot about water, and can probably teach you most of what you need to know about water.
Having spent the last five years working for one of the country’s largest water filtration services, and recently moving over to work with one of the world’s biggest names in water filtration, Brita, this particular liquid is a big part of David’s working life. And, because most coffee lovers don’t think, talk or preach as much about water as David does, his mission is to get all involved in the coffee industry to understand the importance of water.
Water, he points out, is the major ingredient in coffee and having poor water quality can prove detrimental to a quality beverage as well as the equipment used to make the beverage.
“It is something that is being taken for granted. You turn on the tap and the water is always there,” he says. “There is this old-school mentality that if the water is fine to drink then it should be fine to make coffee with. But, it is different when you add factors like heat and pressure. That’s where we see all these problems.”
For most of his career David has specialised in the water filtration industry, working specifically with roasters and machine suppliers in the industry. Over the years, he says he seen a general lack of understanding about how water can affect the taste of coffee. Due to the integral workings of a coffee machine, he explains, when heat and pressure is applied to the coffee the smallest imperfections are magnified. Chlorine, ammonia and other chemicals used to make water safe to drink, if left untreated, can have an adverse reaction to coffee and equipment.
Water, David explains, has the ability to absorb everything it touches in relation to taste and minerals. In Australia, public water processing centres have traditionally used chlorine to kill organics that have been absorbed. While this ensures that water is safe to drink, it is not such good news for coffee drinkers. Coffee, he explains, is naturally an organic substance and so the chlorine in water is actually killing the tastes and odours that coffee growers, roasters and baristas have worked so hard to perfect. Bad water can account for a number of imperfections in the brewing process.
“The Australian public are well educated in how a good coffee tastes and if you don’t have the right taste you will not have those customers coming back,” he says.
As if poor tasting coffee wasn’t enough to make café owners think about the subject, David further points out that bad water can do more than just damage the finished product. It can also seriously harm coffee making equipment. As the water travels through pipes to get to espresso machines, it picks up various minerals along the way, such as calcium and magnesium. When these minerals are heated in the machine, it leads to scale build-up.
“Scale is like the candy coating on the outside of an M&M,” David explains. “The reason the candy doesn’t melt in your hand is because that coating insulates it. Scale does the same thing to your heating elements, insulating the heat in and doubling the amount of work these heaters have to do.”
This can lead to higher energy costs and faster wear and tear on the machines. Just 0.5 millimetres of scale build-up can increase energy running costs by up to 25 per cent.
Scale can also lead to serious blockages, which can happen pretty fast with pipes in some espresso machines working the water through a hole the size of the head of a pin. David notes that around 70 per cent of espresso machine faults are linked to scale. For instance, in a boiler, the sensor probes inside can easily build up with scale, which can lead to underfilling or overfilling the boiler.
“These kind of costs are entirely preventable,” David says. “What business can afford inconsistent coffee quality and increased machine running and maintenance costs.”
As far as filter options are concerned, there are many companies that add polyphosphate dosing systems. Polyphosphate binds to calcium and magnesium in an effort to keep it suspended in water, however when polyphosphate is exposed to extreme water temperatures it can prove less efficient.
Currently the most common method of treating water in Australia relies on polyphosphate, however it is still unknown how polyphospate changes the taste profile of coffee. Brita, a family owned business with more than 43 years experience in the water industry, entered the Australian market three years ago. The company is the market leader for the coffee and foodservice industry in Europe.
David says he genuinely believes the market in Australia is going to make a change to this new Brita technology. The difference with Brita, he notes, is that instead of just introducing the polyphosphates into the water, Brita filters work by reducing calcium and magnesium, the main causes of scale in machines, as well as reducing heavy metals such as lead, copper and zinc and all the while, not introducing anything into the water “The difference with Brita is we only take out substances out of the water and don’t introduce anything to the water,” David emphasises.
The Brita purity C system also works by filtering 100 per cent of the water, even what David says is commonly known as bypass water. This is water that in other systems typically passes over the filter without being processed.
In a geographically diverse landscape such as Australia, water hardness and calcium levels vary throughout the country. In rural areas the use of bore water is common, but this causes serious problems as that water contains heavy minerals that produce a large amount of scale. In this respect, Brita offers the option to adjust the water bypass from 0 to 70 per cent. In areas with softer water, or less calcium, David increases the bypass to help extend the life of the filter, whereas in regional areas with harder water they need to decrease the bypass to ensure the water is being properly treated.
David notes that machine operators, café owners, coffee roasters and suppliers need to understand the importance of fitting a filter and also remember why they fitted a filter and ensure that it is exchanged at the recommended interval, which will then in turn ensure long machine life and beverage quality.
