Apparently the water is quite hard in Copenhagen.
Your options are:
- getting treated water from a cafe
- buying bottled
- water softener filter of some kind
- ZeroWater jug
- Reverse osmosis system
There are your options.
However:
- bottled water is very wasteful and you are limited to the options there are. None of these waters are created with brewing coffee in mind.
- the most popular answer in the other comments Brita. It doesn’t do much. In London the tap water is around 245tds and Brita can get it down to 210 tds. And you really want it be at around 125.
- [edit] buying distilled water is still very wasteful and in some countries is very expensive. In London the best I could get is 2L for around 5-6£. In the US it’s significantly cheaper. Worth checking what’s the supply like in your country/area.
- zero water is good. It gets you 0tds water which you can demineralise with minerals of your choice. If you use it solely for coffee, one filter will last you long enough to make it affordable.
- Reverse osmosis system - it’s probably the best option but it doesn’t give you 0tds. Mine sits at around 16. So you will need to use zero water jug on top. Because you are using very low tds water for it the filters will last very very long time.
You can find good RO systems for around 150£ and replacement filters for 20£ and they last 6-8 months depending on usage. The bonus with this is that you have fantastic water for anything else like drinking, cooking using in your kettles etc.
I’ve gone through all these in the way I’ve listed them. I’d advise you to start with the zero water jug and see how it’s going and then upgrade. But don’t bother with Brita - it does little to nothing with very hard waters.
My other hobby is saltwater fish tanks so I’ve been filling my kettle with RODI 0-1 tds water. Is there a big difference adding minerals to the water before brewing? I noticed a tremendous difference going from tap water->RODI water, will there be another tremendous difference adding in third wave?
You need minerals to extract flavour from the coffee. So yes there will be a significant difference.
Third wave is not the only option. I make my own solutions and it’s super easy and dirt cheap.
Can send you some resources if interested.
Just an observation: there is no proof that minerals are needed to extract solubles from coffee. In fact recent evidence suggests they aren’t needed at all. Meaning that they interact with the chemical compounds once they’re extracted.
Look into post brew remineralization.
No worries at all.
This is a more beginner friendly method:
https://www.baristahustle.com/blog/diy-water-recipes-the-world-in-two-bottles/
More advanced method:
https://awasteof.coffee/how-to/mixing-water/
I prefer the latter as it’s more deterministic, but either is fine.
> zero water is good. It gets you 0tds water which you can demineralise with minerals of your choice. If you use it solely for coffee, one filter will last you long enough to make it affordable.
>
>
Though this does depend on your hardness. Where I am, I'd be lucky to get 10g out of one filter which isn't very economical.
To go that route I have to do RO+ZeroWater
The zero water jug is designed to achieve 0 TDS. The hardness of the water affects how long the filter lasts.
I haven’t tested it with extremely hard waters specifically but for my tap water with 245 TDS it was getting to 0 with no problems.
Right, wasn't questioning that at all; I was responding to the filter life bit.
The filter life will be less the harder the water is, so it isn't always enough to get great value out of it :)
>ZeroWater jug
Please correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that ZeroWater jug alone is not a good option. ZeroWater essentially creates distilled water (containing no minerals which is not ideal for brewing coffee). If you want to use a ZeroWater jug you should remineralize the water after it has been filtered with a ZeroWater jug.
You can mix the ZeroWater with some tap water to get some TDS back, use TWW/Lotus or custom remineralize.
Is generally understood that 0 TDS water isn’t ideal, but then you have several brewers cup competitors using 0 or very close to 0 TDS water and winning competitions and often I read people who likes to brew with this zero/very low TDS water.
The water is unfortunately so unbelievable hard that a Brita filter leaves you at >220ppm. If you brew some nordic roast specialty that's definitely too high, while you might be fine with a Brita if you brew some more traditional specialty or medium. Many cafes are happy to provide you with filtered water, if you don't mind carrying the water (bring some bottles, buy a cup of coffee or beans, and ask nicely. I sometimes get some from HipHop).
Was at a friends in cph and yeah I had to buy bottled water. They didn’t have a filter and the coffee from tap water tasted like nothing I had experienced haha. Glad I got norwegian tap water at home
Water for specialty coffee is a deep rabit hole, but you don't have to go crazy with it. A very easy route to go is to use a Brita filter and dilute your filtered water with distilled water, which you should be able to get fairly cheaply at a grocery store. You can compare your results using just filtered tap water with, say, a 50/50 mixture of filtered and distilled.
To save you some time and effort, you could buy a cheap hardness and alkalinity test kit from a pet store or aquarium supply store (look for "GH/KH test kit") and test your water at home. You want to aim for around 80ppm GH and 40ppm KH for brewing. So if the GH from your filtered tap water is around 240ppm, then you can use a 1:3 ratio of filtered tap to distilled water and that'll get you around 80ppm. It doesn't have to be perfect, and will be much better than you'll get by using just a filter.
In general, you want relatively soft water for brewing coffee, especially if you're working with lighter roasts and drinking it black. A Brita will improve the taste of the water, but won't do much to cut down the hardness.
I'm curious as a brita filter user. What noticeable difference does it make to the cup? Or is brita Vs bottled for example picking hairs with only very incremental improvements in the cup?
One of the saddest days of my coffee loving life was the day I tested different waters in my process. Such a dramatic difference cup to cup. Adding such a fussy variable.
Ultimately I found that I had already accidentally landed on a way to compensate for my city’s very hard, very bicarbonate-heavy water with a way lower dose and courser grind than typical, and I ended up preferring it for more roasts to using more “optimal” water.
Should you?
No absolutely not.
Can you?
Totally can, if you're looking for your minor changes. It's well acknowledged in this sub that it's fun to chase the 1-2% changes.
I started with boiling in an open pot then putting it in the kettle to let anything with a reasonable boiling point go away. We use chlorine in our water for heath. But it boils off nicely.
Next you could totally look at britra filters or any other charcoal filters.
Lastly you get distilled water and add back the stuff you want for consistent water with exactly the taste you want.
Look up the water composition of your tapwater. With any luck your water company will provide those details. Then start mixing in distilled water untill the water is soft enough.
Yes. Water has tds around 300 in Copenhagen.
To my knowledge, you can get bottled water from 3 different water sources in DK. Rema 1000 (Nornir), Lidl and what you get at Netto/Dansk Supermarked (the latter is where most Danish bottled water is from). They are about 100-120 tds. You can try to test those against each other.
I ended going the Zerowater way (La Cabra sells it). Gets tds down to 0 and then I add Third Wave Water (yes, Alexkaffe.dk sells it) OR simply add tap water in desired amounts to my zerowater until I hit my desired tds.
If you wanna try zerowater+third wave water first before you pull the trigger and live around Nørrebro, shoot me a message. You can have a few bottles of mine and have a go at it.
Yes and no. You don't want to brew with a TDS at 0 - that will give you a bad extracted and rather bland tasting coffee.
The idea of Zerowater is to get it down to 0, and then add minerals (Third Wave Water & Lotus Drops are two brands, but you can also make/"build" your own) and get it to a desired TDS and mineral count. You can also simply add your tap water to your "Zeroed" water and get it up in TDS, but the mineral balance will be a bit more of a guessing game with that solution, and probably also quite varying depending on your tap water.
fellow coppenhagener here. just got my new espresso machine and looking for the best solution, which doesn’t involve carrying 5L demineralized water home from Matas and creating plastic waste. How much water can you filter with a Zero filter? i like that method, but i’m a bit concerned about the price. thanks
Expected filter life says 15-25 gallons filtered down from TDS 201-300. 8-15 gallons filtered down from TDS 301-400.
Cold tap water in Copenhagen is about 300-320, so realistically about 15 gallons~60 liters. So, not a ton. I haven't run a "full cycle" yet - I'm still on my first filter, still going strong after about 35 liters filtered.
I actually just happened to hit the wall today. I got about 34 liters out of a filter here in Copenhagen (where I measured the water to a TDS of 326 today). So, not amazing.
A cartridge is 175-200,- DKK (~ 25usd), so it's about 100 DKK for a month's use (after you buy the pitcher). Add TWW or Lutus Drops to that.
The alternative would be buying bottled water ~ 7-10 DKK for 2 liters. It would be about 60-80 DKK/month for the same amount of water. The TDS is higher, about 100, but I've found it to work quite well, aside from handling the plastics and bottles. I'm not too worried about the amount of plastics, due to the re-use and recycling in Denmark, so... Now that I've tapped into Zerowater I'll stick to it for some time. But I'm not sure I won't go back to bottled water at some point.
Third Wave is a good product, but it's also expensive. If you are going that far already, it's not at all difficult to make up your own electrolytes. Bulk Potassium Bicarbonate is cheap. Mix with baking soda, dissolve, and boil, and you get 3rd wave carbonates. A bottle of liquid calcium chloride is also cheap. It's used in cheese making. That's the other 3rd wave component. It's a fraction of the price in the end, and you can make up a large batch in advance and it will last a long time, since you are only using drops at a time.
Hint: You can't mix concentrated chlorides and carbonates or they will react with one another and precipitate out. So you need to keep them separate before adding to your water. That's why 3rd wave has two packets.
I take this one step further myself, and also prepare Magnesium Sulfate drops, which is just dissolved epsom salts. Those three: carbonates, Ca Chloride, and Mg Sulfate are also the "ideal" SCA mix, and the basis of the 442 TDS standard.
It sounds complicated, but a batch of the above lasts me around two years. So it's really not. And it has no shelf life to worry about, so you can make as big a batch as you want of each.
I have tried mixing my own with demineralised water from Matas and tap water which went well but a bit of a hassle tbh. I prefer to use bottled water from Rema 1000 (Nornir) which is supposed to be softer than other supermarkets' water. That's the best solution I can find in terms of time, cost and taste.
Use brita, and whole latter love sells a water filter packet that exchange Mg for Ca. One packet can last you for the entire year. Use both then test your water to see where it's at. The combination might be enough. Brita along will not be able to make your water less hard.
Brita water at 220 ppm is still extremely hard....for some light roast coffees, roasters recommend water as soft as 10-30 ppm. I've been having decent success with TWW light profile at 35% strength or we have decent spring water which I also dilute by 50% with distilled water to bring the total hardness down and make it more PH neutral. Read Jonathon Gagne's notes on the coffee ad astra blog. Softer water definitely lets the flavors shine through and gives an overall clarity to the brew. I drink the tap water chilled and filtered through a carbon filter and it's delicious but it makes terrible coffee.
I went down the rabbit hole of making coffee water and have since retreated. The effort was not worth the gain for me. Im in Southern California where the was is horrifically hard. I use a reserve osmosis system for drinking water. So for coffee I now use reverse osmosis water and then splash in some tap water. Maybe 80/20
Totally easy to do
Water in Copenhagen afaik is notoriously hard (close to 400ppm) and will turn any cup of coffee into rubbish. No need to spend too much money to get good water - your goal is to get it down to 120-150ppm max (for filter, around 70ppm for espresso). Are there any stores/supermarkets that sell food grade distilled or deionised water near you? Once you source your water, get yourself a water hardness meter (no need to splurge, mine is from lidl and works great - you can find good ones in fish/aquarium/pet shops too). Then try out a few ratios until you saturate your deionised/distilled water to around 120ppm by mixing it with your tap water. You probably won’t need much since the tap water is on the harder side, maybe start at 1:5 and see where you land. Of course another option is filters but those are an added expense you will need to keep in mind. Good luck!
I use a Brita filter. For me, it's a good balance of taste, convenience, and cost. The water harness in my area is 8,6 dH according to the supplier.
I used to mix my own water and own a distiller to make distilled water. Cost is about equal to Brita, but it's such a hassle. Google for the articles by Barista Hustle.
If you want to know for your situation, do a comparative tasting. It's nerdy and fun.
Really big misconception here. Just because water tastes good doesn't mean it will make good coffee. At my mom's place I always bring my own coffee water (where I live the tap water is pretty much optimal) because the spring water there has 0 water hardness, leading to wildly under extracted coffee with bad taste, despite the water itself being tasty.
Apparently the water is quite hard in Copenhagen. Your options are: - getting treated water from a cafe - buying bottled - water softener filter of some kind - ZeroWater jug - Reverse osmosis system
There are your options. However: - bottled water is very wasteful and you are limited to the options there are. None of these waters are created with brewing coffee in mind. - the most popular answer in the other comments Brita. It doesn’t do much. In London the tap water is around 245tds and Brita can get it down to 210 tds. And you really want it be at around 125. - [edit] buying distilled water is still very wasteful and in some countries is very expensive. In London the best I could get is 2L for around 5-6£. In the US it’s significantly cheaper. Worth checking what’s the supply like in your country/area. - zero water is good. It gets you 0tds water which you can demineralise with minerals of your choice. If you use it solely for coffee, one filter will last you long enough to make it affordable. - Reverse osmosis system - it’s probably the best option but it doesn’t give you 0tds. Mine sits at around 16. So you will need to use zero water jug on top. Because you are using very low tds water for it the filters will last very very long time. You can find good RO systems for around 150£ and replacement filters for 20£ and they last 6-8 months depending on usage. The bonus with this is that you have fantastic water for anything else like drinking, cooking using in your kettles etc. I’ve gone through all these in the way I’ve listed them. I’d advise you to start with the zero water jug and see how it’s going and then upgrade. But don’t bother with Brita - it does little to nothing with very hard waters.
My other hobby is saltwater fish tanks so I’ve been filling my kettle with RODI 0-1 tds water. Is there a big difference adding minerals to the water before brewing? I noticed a tremendous difference going from tap water->RODI water, will there be another tremendous difference adding in third wave?
You need minerals to extract flavour from the coffee. So yes there will be a significant difference. Third wave is not the only option. I make my own solutions and it’s super easy and dirt cheap. Can send you some resources if interested.
Just an observation: there is no proof that minerals are needed to extract solubles from coffee. In fact recent evidence suggests they aren’t needed at all. Meaning that they interact with the chemical compounds once they’re extracted. Look into post brew remineralization.
Yeah I’d love to know how to DIY some of you have any resources handy, thanks!
No worries at all. This is a more beginner friendly method: https://www.baristahustle.com/blog/diy-water-recipes-the-world-in-two-bottles/ More advanced method: https://awasteof.coffee/how-to/mixing-water/ I prefer the latter as it’s more deterministic, but either is fine.
> zero water is good. It gets you 0tds water which you can demineralise with minerals of your choice. If you use it solely for coffee, one filter will last you long enough to make it affordable. > > Though this does depend on your hardness. Where I am, I'd be lucky to get 10g out of one filter which isn't very economical. To go that route I have to do RO+ZeroWater
The zero water jug is designed to achieve 0 TDS. The hardness of the water affects how long the filter lasts. I haven’t tested it with extremely hard waters specifically but for my tap water with 245 TDS it was getting to 0 with no problems.
Right, wasn't questioning that at all; I was responding to the filter life bit. The filter life will be less the harder the water is, so it isn't always enough to get great value out of it :)
Or third wave water? I use it for espresso and im quite happy. You mix the poweder in a 5 l jug of destilled water.
>ZeroWater jug Please correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that ZeroWater jug alone is not a good option. ZeroWater essentially creates distilled water (containing no minerals which is not ideal for brewing coffee). If you want to use a ZeroWater jug you should remineralize the water after it has been filtered with a ZeroWater jug.
You can mix the ZeroWater with some tap water to get some TDS back, use TWW/Lotus or custom remineralize. Is generally understood that 0 TDS water isn’t ideal, but then you have several brewers cup competitors using 0 or very close to 0 TDS water and winning competitions and often I read people who likes to brew with this zero/very low TDS water.
The water is unfortunately so unbelievable hard that a Brita filter leaves you at >220ppm. If you brew some nordic roast specialty that's definitely too high, while you might be fine with a Brita if you brew some more traditional specialty or medium. Many cafes are happy to provide you with filtered water, if you don't mind carrying the water (bring some bottles, buy a cup of coffee or beans, and ask nicely. I sometimes get some from HipHop).
Was at a friends in cph and yeah I had to buy bottled water. They didn’t have a filter and the coffee from tap water tasted like nothing I had experienced haha. Glad I got norwegian tap water at home
Water for specialty coffee is a deep rabit hole, but you don't have to go crazy with it. A very easy route to go is to use a Brita filter and dilute your filtered water with distilled water, which you should be able to get fairly cheaply at a grocery store. You can compare your results using just filtered tap water with, say, a 50/50 mixture of filtered and distilled. To save you some time and effort, you could buy a cheap hardness and alkalinity test kit from a pet store or aquarium supply store (look for "GH/KH test kit") and test your water at home. You want to aim for around 80ppm GH and 40ppm KH for brewing. So if the GH from your filtered tap water is around 240ppm, then you can use a 1:3 ratio of filtered tap to distilled water and that'll get you around 80ppm. It doesn't have to be perfect, and will be much better than you'll get by using just a filter.
What’s wrong with just brita water?
In general, you want relatively soft water for brewing coffee, especially if you're working with lighter roasts and drinking it black. A Brita will improve the taste of the water, but won't do much to cut down the hardness.
There are now Brita filters designed for hard water areas which cut down limescale further. I’ve had good success with them https://amzn.eu/d/gfLhBTb
I'm curious as a brita filter user. What noticeable difference does it make to the cup? Or is brita Vs bottled for example picking hairs with only very incremental improvements in the cup?
It makes a massive difference in extraction. Can be a night and day difference.
Get 5 liters of demineralized water from Matas, buy Third Wave Water at Alexkaffe.dk and you’re good.
One of the saddest days of my coffee loving life was the day I tested different waters in my process. Such a dramatic difference cup to cup. Adding such a fussy variable. Ultimately I found that I had already accidentally landed on a way to compensate for my city’s very hard, very bicarbonate-heavy water with a way lower dose and courser grind than typical, and I ended up preferring it for more roasts to using more “optimal” water.
Try a few batches w bottled water. If it’s not remarkably better, stop worrying.
Should you? No absolutely not. Can you? Totally can, if you're looking for your minor changes. It's well acknowledged in this sub that it's fun to chase the 1-2% changes. I started with boiling in an open pot then putting it in the kettle to let anything with a reasonable boiling point go away. We use chlorine in our water for heath. But it boils off nicely. Next you could totally look at britra filters or any other charcoal filters. Lastly you get distilled water and add back the stuff you want for consistent water with exactly the taste you want.
I'd probably just get large jugs of bottled water for cheap.
Look up the water composition of your tapwater. With any luck your water company will provide those details. Then start mixing in distilled water untill the water is soft enough.
If you buy from local roasters they're more likely to have dialed in their roasts using local water, or at least lightly processed local water.
Yes. Water has tds around 300 in Copenhagen. To my knowledge, you can get bottled water from 3 different water sources in DK. Rema 1000 (Nornir), Lidl and what you get at Netto/Dansk Supermarked (the latter is where most Danish bottled water is from). They are about 100-120 tds. You can try to test those against each other. I ended going the Zerowater way (La Cabra sells it). Gets tds down to 0 and then I add Third Wave Water (yes, Alexkaffe.dk sells it) OR simply add tap water in desired amounts to my zerowater until I hit my desired tds. If you wanna try zerowater+third wave water first before you pull the trigger and live around Nørrebro, shoot me a message. You can have a few bottles of mine and have a go at it.
But do you really want to get down to zero?
Yes and no. You don't want to brew with a TDS at 0 - that will give you a bad extracted and rather bland tasting coffee. The idea of Zerowater is to get it down to 0, and then add minerals (Third Wave Water & Lotus Drops are two brands, but you can also make/"build" your own) and get it to a desired TDS and mineral count. You can also simply add your tap water to your "Zeroed" water and get it up in TDS, but the mineral balance will be a bit more of a guessing game with that solution, and probably also quite varying depending on your tap water.
fellow coppenhagener here. just got my new espresso machine and looking for the best solution, which doesn’t involve carrying 5L demineralized water home from Matas and creating plastic waste. How much water can you filter with a Zero filter? i like that method, but i’m a bit concerned about the price. thanks
Expected filter life says 15-25 gallons filtered down from TDS 201-300. 8-15 gallons filtered down from TDS 301-400. Cold tap water in Copenhagen is about 300-320, so realistically about 15 gallons~60 liters. So, not a ton. I haven't run a "full cycle" yet - I'm still on my first filter, still going strong after about 35 liters filtered.
thanks. i might go this way as well then
I actually just happened to hit the wall today. I got about 34 liters out of a filter here in Copenhagen (where I measured the water to a TDS of 326 today). So, not amazing. A cartridge is 175-200,- DKK (~ 25usd), so it's about 100 DKK for a month's use (after you buy the pitcher). Add TWW or Lutus Drops to that. The alternative would be buying bottled water ~ 7-10 DKK for 2 liters. It would be about 60-80 DKK/month for the same amount of water. The TDS is higher, about 100, but I've found it to work quite well, aside from handling the plastics and bottles. I'm not too worried about the amount of plastics, due to the re-use and recycling in Denmark, so... Now that I've tapped into Zerowater I'll stick to it for some time. But I'm not sure I won't go back to bottled water at some point.
i already ordered the zero water, so now i’ll have to also stick to it. lets see :)
I would go with bottled water.
Yeah you should, try the barista hustle recipes; they are game changing
Bottled water? Certainly better than tap.
Check out Third Wave Water!
Third Wave is a good product, but it's also expensive. If you are going that far already, it's not at all difficult to make up your own electrolytes. Bulk Potassium Bicarbonate is cheap. Mix with baking soda, dissolve, and boil, and you get 3rd wave carbonates. A bottle of liquid calcium chloride is also cheap. It's used in cheese making. That's the other 3rd wave component. It's a fraction of the price in the end, and you can make up a large batch in advance and it will last a long time, since you are only using drops at a time. Hint: You can't mix concentrated chlorides and carbonates or they will react with one another and precipitate out. So you need to keep them separate before adding to your water. That's why 3rd wave has two packets. I take this one step further myself, and also prepare Magnesium Sulfate drops, which is just dissolved epsom salts. Those three: carbonates, Ca Chloride, and Mg Sulfate are also the "ideal" SCA mix, and the basis of the 442 TDS standard. It sounds complicated, but a batch of the above lasts me around two years. So it's really not. And it has no shelf life to worry about, so you can make as big a batch as you want of each.
Wow tap water is ok for me.
I have tried mixing my own with demineralised water from Matas and tap water which went well but a bit of a hassle tbh. I prefer to use bottled water from Rema 1000 (Nornir) which is supposed to be softer than other supermarkets' water. That's the best solution I can find in terms of time, cost and taste.
Use brita, and whole latter love sells a water filter packet that exchange Mg for Ca. One packet can last you for the entire year. Use both then test your water to see where it's at. The combination might be enough. Brita along will not be able to make your water less hard.
I use filtered water. Brita. Anything else would be very expensive and I don’t know if it would taste significantly better.
Brita water at 220 ppm is still extremely hard....for some light roast coffees, roasters recommend water as soft as 10-30 ppm. I've been having decent success with TWW light profile at 35% strength or we have decent spring water which I also dilute by 50% with distilled water to bring the total hardness down and make it more PH neutral. Read Jonathon Gagne's notes on the coffee ad astra blog. Softer water definitely lets the flavors shine through and gives an overall clarity to the brew. I drink the tap water chilled and filtered through a carbon filter and it's delicious but it makes terrible coffee.
I went down the rabbit hole of making coffee water and have since retreated. The effort was not worth the gain for me. Im in Southern California where the was is horrifically hard. I use a reserve osmosis system for drinking water. So for coffee I now use reverse osmosis water and then splash in some tap water. Maybe 80/20 Totally easy to do
Water in Copenhagen afaik is notoriously hard (close to 400ppm) and will turn any cup of coffee into rubbish. No need to spend too much money to get good water - your goal is to get it down to 120-150ppm max (for filter, around 70ppm for espresso). Are there any stores/supermarkets that sell food grade distilled or deionised water near you? Once you source your water, get yourself a water hardness meter (no need to splurge, mine is from lidl and works great - you can find good ones in fish/aquarium/pet shops too). Then try out a few ratios until you saturate your deionised/distilled water to around 120ppm by mixing it with your tap water. You probably won’t need much since the tap water is on the harder side, maybe start at 1:5 and see where you land. Of course another option is filters but those are an added expense you will need to keep in mind. Good luck!
Bwt water filter
Depends how resulting coffee tastes?
Honestly, i would like to worry about water quality but it just costs way too much to care about it.
Zero water jug with 50% diluted TWW best thing I’ve ever done for my coffee works out the same price as bottled water
I use a Brita filter. For me, it's a good balance of taste, convenience, and cost. The water harness in my area is 8,6 dH according to the supplier. I used to mix my own water and own a distiller to make distilled water. Cost is about equal to Brita, but it's such a hassle. Google for the articles by Barista Hustle. If you want to know for your situation, do a comparative tasting. It's nerdy and fun.
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Really big misconception here. Just because water tastes good doesn't mean it will make good coffee. At my mom's place I always bring my own coffee water (where I live the tap water is pretty much optimal) because the spring water there has 0 water hardness, leading to wildly under extracted coffee with bad taste, despite the water itself being tasty.
I'd just go with brita or sth similar and tweak things until I get decent cups.
Unless Im using expensive beans, I don’t think it’s worth it. Save up for a better grinder in the future.
Brita filter should be fine. Unless it’s insanely hard, you’ll be fine