The single biggest variable in your home brew is not your grinder. It is not your kettle. It is not even the bean. It is the water you pour through the bean. And in Saudi Arabia, water is the variable people pay the least attention to.
Riyadh tap water, depending on the district and the day, runs between roughly 350 and 600 parts per million in total dissolved solids. The Specialty Coffee Association recommendation for brewing water is 150 ppm, give or take. We are routinely brewing at three to four times the optimal mineral load. The result, on a light roast, is a cup that tastes flat: the high mineral content saturates the water before it has finished extracting from the bean, and the brighter aromatic compounds — the jasmine in a Yirgacheffe, the blackcurrant in a Kenyan — never make it into solution. The cup arrives one-dimensional. Most people blame the bean. The bean is not the problem.
The fix is simpler than people expect. You do not need a reverse-osmosis rig. You need a bottled water with a published mineral profile, a kettle that holds 96 degrees, and a recipe you trust enough to follow without improvising. Here is the V60 dial-in we use as our house default at the roastery, and the one we recommend to every customer who writes asking why their light roast tastes thin.
Recipe. Twenty-two grams of coffee. Three hundred and fifty grams of water. Ratio 1:16. Grind: medium-fine, about a 6 on a Comandante or two clicks finer than your filter default. Water: 96 degrees Celsius. Filter: rinsed with hot water before the brew to take the paper taste out and pre-heat the carafe.
Pour. Bloom with double the coffee weight in water — 44 grams — for thirty seconds. Use the bloom to wet every ground; we like a gentle swirl rather than a stir. After thirty seconds, pour the next 156 grams in slow concentric circles, finishing at the 200-gram mark by the one-minute fifteen-second mark. Wait fifteen seconds. Pour the last 150 grams in a single steady stream from the centre outward, ending at the 350-gram mark by two minutes flat. Total brew time should land between two minutes thirty and three minutes. If it is faster, grind finer. If it is slower, grind coarser.
Water. This is where most home brewers leave money on the table. We have settled on a low-mineral local bottled water in the 60-90 ppm range as our house brewing water. It costs a few halalas more per litre than tap. It costs you nothing in equipment. It transforms light roasts overnight. If you cannot find a clean low-TDS bottled water, a 1:1 mix of distilled water and a mid-mineral bottled water will get you close.
Taste, then adjust. A V60 brewed correctly with our Yirgacheffe should give you jasmine on the nose, bergamot on the palate, and a clean lemon finish. If the cup is sour, grind finer or pour slower. If the cup is bitter or muddy, grind coarser or pour faster. Adjust one variable at a time. Two changes at once and you will not know which one helped.
This is not the only way to brew. It is one way to brew, calibrated for the water most of you are starting with. Take what works, ignore what does not, and write to us if you find a tweak that improves the cup. We listen. The recipe in the journal is the recipe we change every time someone teaches us something better.