There’s no doubt within the coffee industry that water hardness has a huge impact on how a coffee tastes;
it’s the reason why most specialty coffee shops have an under-counter water filtration system. However, there’s no easy, affordable solution for home brewers living in hard water areas – until now. Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood of Colonna Coffee fame has created Peak Water, a home water filtration device set to transform your morning coffee.

Back in 2013, Maxwell began researching water for his book, Water for Coffee. “The book was a real success, and it taught me so much about the importance of water,” says Maxwell. “Me and Chris Hendon, a researcher, realised that the coffee industry only has two water solutions: a Reverse Osmosis system and a cartridge. Neither give baristas total control over water because they both depend on the source water going in.”

From writing his book and running Colonna, Maxwell spotted a gap in the consumer market. “We tell customers to use ‘good’ water when they buy coffee beans. But there isn’t really a hardness solution for the home coffee maker that lets them mimic the good, natural waters used in specialty shops,” he says.

“I thought it’d be cool to get the end consumer on to the same playing field as the cafes by giving them the same filtered water. So, we’ve taken a format that is prevalent all around the world – the home water filter jug – and transformed it into Peak Water, an adjustable water jug that utilises cafe filtration technology. Thanks to the high-quality resins we are putting in it and the bypass system that stops water being overfiltered, it’s performing better than most of the commercial systems and winning taste tests against them.”

Peak Water works by adjusting alkalinity. The higher the bicarbonate content in water, the higher the alkalinity. Bicarbonate wipes out the acidity in coffee, making it taste dull and earthy, so the filtration system strips bicarbonate away. Peak Water customers use a strip to test their water’s alkalinity then set the jug’s filtration to suit. “Of course, you can play around with this level of filtering, but we give a recommendation,” says Maxwell. “I’ve realised that there really isn’t one perfect water, because different coffees suit different water hardnesses.”

Stepping into the world of product development certainly wasn’t easy for Maxwell, who hadn’t created a new product from scratch before. “I had the idea for Peak Water. Because I work in the coffee industry I had a great network to call on for help, and I had enough of an understanding of supply chains and product development after making the Colonna capsules, so I was confident.”

The main difficulty was that none of the jug’s components were already in existence, so all parts are bespoke. The research and development (R&D) stage took more than three years, and there are still small tweaks being made.