The short answer is no!

JP and I were tweeting back and forth on Twitter about the importance of your source of water when making coffee.  I wrote recently on the different options between top, filtered, and spring and what it means to the flavor of your coffee.  After all, coffee is 99% water so you should use the best water you can.

There is some misconception that your source of water isn’t important because it’s going to be heated through the course of the coffee being brewed.  If you use a standard drip-brewer, the water will never get hot enough to be considered purified, so don’t consider the heat of the process to be “cleansing” the water that ends up in your coffee mug.  In fact, consider the quality of that water to be the same at the end of the cycle as what you pour into it (for the most part).


For water to be purified by heat, it has to be boiling heat.  The boiling point of water is 212 deg F or 100 deg C (yes, doesn’t Celsius make so much more sense to use?!).  We don’t want to boil water just before its contact with the coffee because “boiled coffee is spoiled coffee” – coffee taste is seriously affected and bitter if it is boiled at any stage.

So, the optimal temperature at which to boil water is 195-205 deg F, hot enough to extract optimal solids, oils, and flavor from the coffee but not hot enough to boil and ruin the coffee.  Heat is needed to extract flavor as the water passes through the coffee in the filter, but it is just shy of enough heat to have a purifying effect on the water, so the water quality doesn’t change to a significant degree.

That means you can’t count on your coffeemaker to purify water as it makes your coffee.  I suggest again to check out the recent post on water quality so you can be sure you’re using the right kind of that all-important ingredient to coffee – the water itself.