The Water You Make Your Cacao With

A cup of drinking cacao is somewhere north of ninety percent water by weight. Almost everyone obsesses over the other ten percent and gives no thought at all to the ninety — which is odd, because the water is not an inert carrier. Its mineral content changes what gets extracted and how the result tastes.

This article is about water twice over: the water you make the cup with, and orange blossom water, which is a distillate and a very different thing from what most people assume.

Distilled water makes a flat cup

The instinct is that purer water must make a cleaner drink. It does not. Cacao made with distilled or heavily reverse-osmosis-filtered water comes out hollow — thin, flat, missing its middle.

Dissolved minerals participate directly in extraction. Cations in the water bind to flavour compounds and help pull them out of the solid material into solution. Strip the minerals out and you have removed part of the extraction mechanism.

There is a second, separate effect: minerals contribute to taste perception in their own right, adding a sense of body and mouthfeel that pure water cannot. Both effects point the same way.

The specialty coffee world has done most of the measurement here, and the numbers transfer usefully. The broadly accepted target is total dissolved solids somewhere around 150 mg/L, with an acceptable band roughly between 75 and 250. Below that things go hollow; well above it, muddy.

Magnesium and calcium pull different things out

Not all hardness is equivalent, and this is the detail that rewards attention.

Water hardness is mostly calcium and magnesium, and research on extraction has found the two behave differently. Magnesium is the more effective at binding and extracting flavour compounds, and magnesium-rich water tends to produce a brighter, fruitier, more aromatic result. Calcium extracts differently and pushes toward a heavier, creamier, more rounded profile.

Neither is correct. They are different outcomes, and knowing which you have lets you predict what your tap is doing to your cup.

For Chuncho cacao, whose character is largely in its bright fruit and floral top notes, magnesium-leaning water flatters it. If your cacao consistently tastes heavier and duller than the description on the bag suggests, hard calcium-rich tap water is a plausible culprit and an easy one to test.

Alkalinity is the hidden variable

Separate from hardness, and more consequential than most people realise, is alkalinity — largely bicarbonate, and a measure of the water's capacity to buffer acid.

Cacao contains organic acids that contribute brightness and lift. High-alkalinity water neutralises them, and the result tastes flat, dull, and slightly chalky, with the fruit notes muted. Very low alkalinity does the opposite: nothing buffers the acidity and the cup can taste sharp or sour.

The coffee-derived target is roughly 40 to 75 mg/L as calcium carbonate. Most published guidance treats alkalinity as the variable worth controlling first, because its effect on perceived brightness is large and one-directional.

If your cacao tastes reliably flat and you have already ruled out boiling the liquid, alkalinity is the next thing to look at.

What to actually use

Practical, in ascending order of effort.

Filtered tap water is fine in most places. A carbon filter removes chlorine — which genuinely does damage aroma — while leaving the minerals alone. This is the right default.

Bottled water with a published analysis is the cheap experiment. Mineral waters print their composition on the label. Look for one in the 100 to 200 mg/L dry residue range with magnesium present and moderate bicarbonate, and compare it against your tap side by side with the same cacao, same dose, same temperature. The difference is usually obvious and occasionally startling.

Never distilled or RO water alone. If that is what you have, it needs remineralising; people who go this route use commercial mineral concentrates or make up their own.

Avoid softened water. Domestic softeners exchange calcium and magnesium for sodium. You keep the total dissolved solids and lose exactly the cations that were doing the extracting, and gain salt. It is the worst option for this purpose.

Orange blossom water is a by-product

Now the other water, and the thing most people get wrong about it.

Orange flower water is a hydrosol — the aqueous fraction left over when the blossoms of the bitter orange, Citrus aurantium, are steam distilled. The oil that separates out is neroli, historically one of the most expensive materials in perfumery. The water that remains behind carries the water-soluble aromatic compounds.

Historically the hydrosol was the secondary product and the oil was the prize. It is used across North African, Levantine, and southern European cooking, in pastries, syrups, and drinks.

Rose water works the same way, distilled from Rosa damascena, with the oil as attar of rose.

Neroli and orange flower water are not interchangeable

They come from the same distillation and they are wildly different in strength. Neroli is a concentrated essential oil. Orange flower water is dilute.

Substituting one for the other by volume produces an inedible result. Recipes calling for orange flower water in teaspoons mean the hydrosol.

Two further distinctions when buying. Some cheaper products are not distilled at all but water with added flavouring, which tastes thin and soapy — the label should say distilled, and the ingredients should be water and orange blossom extract or distillate, nothing more. And orange flower water is not the same as orange extract or orange oil, which come from the peel and taste of orange fruit rather than blossom. The blossom note is floral, honeyed, and slightly green, with no citrus-fruit character at all.

Dose: 2 to 3 ml in a 240 ml cup, which is roughly half a teaspoon. Add it at the end, off the heat, since the aromatics are volatile. It is potent, and past about 5 ml it stops being floral and turns distinctly perfumed.

The tasting cup

Since this is a tasting cup rather than a recipe, build it as a comparison and learn something in the process.

Make two cups identically — 14 g of cacao in 240 ml at 75°C, whisked smooth, a pinch of salt in each. Use your normal tap or filtered water for one, and a mineral water with a printed analysis for the other. Taste them side by side before adding anything else.

The differences to look for are body, brightness, and how long the finish lasts. Most people expect to notice nothing and are surprised. If you find no difference at all, your tap water is already in a good range and you can stop thinking about it.

Then add 2 ml of orange flower water to whichever you preferred, and taste again. The blossom sits on top of cacao's fruit notes rather than covering them, and against a bright, well-extracted cup it is genuinely lovely. Against a flat one it just sits there, which is itself a useful demonstration of what the water was doing.

For a base with enough character to show these differences clearly, the pure ground Chuncho cacao is the one to use — a blended or sweetened cacao will mask exactly the subtleties you are trying to detect. If you want the full comparative method across more cups, our guide to running a tasting flight sets out the protocol properly.