Does alkaline water improve coffee flavour?

30 April, 2024
Giulia Costa

In our pursuit for the perfect cup of coffee, here at Si Sogno, we are constantly exploring and testing new techniques and approaches to capture emerging coffee trends and customer experiences.
Recently, the question arose: Does alkaline water improve coffee flavour? This inquiry emerged during a meeting with the distribution team from Enagic, a renowned Japanese company specializing in water ionization systems.

Enagic's alkaline water, known as Kangen water, has been reportedly hailed for its health benefits and superior taste. As it happens, we wanted to find out, so we embarked on a journey to uncover the truth behind the claim and its impact on coffee taste and experience.

Keep reading to see the results!

What is Alkaline Water

Kangen water ("return to origin" in Japanese) is alkaline water, used for more than 40 years in Japan to help restore the body to its original, alkaline state.

Alkaline water means that in the pH scale, used to determine whether a substance is acidic or alkaline (7.0 being neutral on the scale): anything above 7 is considered alkaline and anything below 7 is considered acidic. The theory goes that: as our bodies must maintain a pH balance of 7.365, which is slightly alkaline, to preserve optimal health and balance, so alkaline water is beneficial to our well-being.

Furthermore – according to our friends from Kangen water – coffee and tea prepared with Kangen water have a richer taste, a more defined colour and a more intense aroma, due to the water superior extractable ability.

Experiment and Results using Si Sogno coffee bags

Hence, we decided to verify this claim: we placed our Si Sogno coffee bags in two separate glasses, both filled with 100ml COLD water (yes! Cold water): one of the glasses was filled with Alkaline Kangen water, which was filtered just a couple of hours earlier; the other with normal tap filtered water.

Immediately we could notice the change in colour in the glass with alkaline water, due to the superior capability to extract the compounds from the ground coffee.

After 4 minutes of infusion, we moved to the cupping: the coffee brewed in alkaline water resulted in more depth, more body, and a longer-lasting finish.

In summary, alkaline water was the clear winner: better aroma, colour depth and flavour, resulting in a more pleasant coffee cup.

This is also surprising because we used only cold water (not chilled - below room temperature): while the process of cold brew coffee requires the coffee to steep overnight for around 12 hours to infuse all the coffee compounds in the water, you can now have a pleasant and surprising result in just over 4 minutes!

A final thought on the coffee bags: this is another example where Si Sogno coffee bags show their blend of versatility and quality; you can have a quality cup with superior freshly ground coffee in a different format (brew cold / room temperature) with no devices, no complications, no mess, in a very short time!

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