Brewing Clean Water: The metal-remediating benefits of tea preparation
4 comments
·February 25, 2025jqpabc123
horsawlarway
Err... not so much. Most drip coffee makers are basically airlift pumps, where the air is from the liquid boiling to steam.
They're nifty little pumps, but they're absolutely not "distilled water" in the sense that you're imagining - It's not steaming up, condensing, and dripping. It's steaming up, pushing a bunch of liquid water up a small tube, and then burping the whole payload onto the coffee, including any and all impurities that are already in the water.
Example video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xV8vZqHd0ao
They're used lots on budget aquaponics/hydroponics/aeroponics setups because they can push water up surprising heights with nothing but a cheap aquarium air pump, or - in the case of a drip coffee machine - a cheap heating element.
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All of that said - you're still running that water through ground coffee and then a literal filter. I'd not be surprised in the slightest to find it also removes a lot of things.
ryansouza
Drip coffee doesn’t use mainly condensed steam but uses the steam pressure to push the rest of the hot water through the pipes
killingtime74
Well a water filter could do it all better than that. I use a reverse osmosis system at home. The runoff goes to the garden
Ok, so tea leaves can absorb some dissolved metals.
What could be better than that?
How about a drip coffee maker? A drip coffee maker creates little steam explosions to push water vapor to the top of the unit where it condenses and "drips" down over the coffee.
Since steam is being produced, in essence, distilled water is being used which if I understand the physics correctly, should be relatively free of metals.