Yes it's wasteful. Do what I did, save yourself the money and start making your own water, it's extremely easy and costs next to nothing. Check out https://www.tinkercoffee.com/blog/2017/11/9/thats-some-high-quality-h20
this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
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There's also the "pavlis" recipe, or simply the potassium bicarbonate mix:
Make a concentrate of 10 grams per 100 mL, then use 1ml of concentrate per 1 liter.
Be sure to keep the concentrate in the fridge to slow down the growth of any civilizations, though. A 100ml batch lasts me about 6 weeks at roughly 4 shots a day.
I agree they should do better.
Have you considered taking your preferred water recipe of theirs and making it yourself? Its considerably cheaper and no more individual packets.
I saw some discussion on Reddit that implied that would be very hard or very different. If I recall correctly:
- The ingredients aren't the same
- The way TWW mixes things means you get a reliable, even distribution of the ingredients. Mixing at home would be very hard to do at gallon sizes.
- Gallon is too large for me - I prefer liter, and TWW offers liter sized packets. That makes it even more difficult for me to get a correct ingredient distribution.
But again, I might be misremembering something.
Getting it exactly the same would be hard, getting it close enough is not that hard. There isnt some magic ingredients in third wave to massively improve solubility, just Magnesium Sulfate, Calcium Citrate, and Sodium Chloride in classic for example. Any decent hand mixer (or electric milk frother) ran for a minute or two is going to spread the ingredients around plenty.
I would recommend getting some testing strips to compare a DIY vs. the ready done packets to at least confirm the alkalinity and pH is a close match, then go by taste for the Epsom salts starting from the baseline from an existing guide. Just scale the recipe for the size you want to make, you do not have to stick to a gallon, its also not a magical prerequisite for making it.
Its not for everyone as Third Wave sure is convenient but it is significantly cheaper if you use a lot of 3rd wave.
Have you seen Kyles video on how to make your own? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGYrEiubq2U
I don't know what minerals they place in the packets exactly, but some salts tend to be very sensitive to moisture and attract moisture from the atmosphere (more so than sugar or table salt). Kept in a paper satchel, which is permeable to moisture, they could potentially absorb enough moisture to become a wet goopy mess in a paper packet. So my guess is that they use plastic for stability reasons of their mix. Sure, they could sell it in glass jars with a measuring spoon, I guess.
This thread is a new rabbit hole for me to go down.