Straight Tipped Droppers: Brewing with Precision

When you're crafting water to brew coffee, even small changes in mineral concentration can have a large impact on the final cup. Let's say that you brew a cup with 20 ppm of alkalinity but find it to be slightly too acidic. You may think brewing the next at 25 ppm might not make a big difference, but going from 20 to 25 ppm is a 25% increase, hardly a small change. 

That's why we've decided to release the Precision Dropper as an add on to our Coffee Brew Water Kit. Each drop from a straight tipped Precision Dropper delivers approximately half as much as our round tipped droppers. This gives greater control over how much of each mineral you add, making it possible to create more recipes with finer increments. 

Increased Precision and Resolution

Precision and Resolution are mathematical terms that refer to how repeatable something is as well and how many increments of adjustment are available. 

Consider a scenario where you are mixing into 1 liter of water and decide that you want to include some magnesium but don't want to go over 35 GH (general hardness). If you're using a round tipped dropper, you can add 1, 2, 3, or 4 drops before you reach 35 GH. If you were using a straight tipped dropper, you could add 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 drops before reaching 35 GH. That's twice as many increments to choose from when using a straight tipped dropper. In other words, we've increased the resolution. 

A fortunate side effect of adding more drops is that we also increase the precision of our water recipes. Not every drop is exactly the same size, there is some minor variance, but the more drops we add the more likely we are to be closer to our target value. This is because if your first drop is slightly larger than average, your second drop is statistically more likely to be smaller than the first drop, effectively cancelling out some of the variance. The more drops we add, the greater this effect. 

Post Brewing Mineralization

Precision and resolution matter more as we decrease the volume of water or coffee we are adding minerals to. Let's say we are adding minerals to a brewed cup of coffee that is 300 mL and we want to explore recipes up to a maximum of 70 GH and 35 KH. Using a round tipped droppers, there are 36 possible recipes. 

Using a straight tipped dropper, there are 225 possible recipes.

This exponential increase in the number of recipes makes straight tipped droppers far more appropriate for post mineral mineralization. 

Pushing the Limits of What's Possible

You might be wondering at this point, why does the Coffee Brew Water Kit ship with round tipped droppers by default? There are two reasons for this. One is that the advantage of adding more water is that you can mineralize larger volumes with fewer drops. A round tipped dropper makes mineralizing a wider range of water volumes more practical. The other reason is that, on occasion, calcium can drop a slightly larger drop than usual when using a straight tipped dropper, something that the round tipped dropper is not susceptible to. 

However, if you're a brewer who's looking to push limits in a relentless chase for that perfect cup, the Lotus Precision Droppers offer an excellent way to explore the depths of how manipulating water chemistry can dial in your cups to a whole new level. 

Cheers,

Nick Chapman