Water is a huge factor that I neglected for a while. It finally hit me once someone told me that coffee is mostly water, and your coffee is only as good as your water. Makes complete sense, but I had never thought about it. A simple Britta filter goes a long way.

I have very low standards for coffee, use Starbucks bulk beans off of Amazon, and brew it in an automatic mill+drip machine. But a Brita filter for the water makes a world of difference.

Whereabouts do you live? I've visited places where I found tap water undrinkable (Pennsylvania, Florida), but never lived in such a place.

Japan

I liked the water in Toyama, but they had a PR campaign to brand it as “oishii mizu” so people would forget about the cadmium poisoning in the Showa years. The PR campaign worked on me. :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itai-itai_disease

Maybe I'm missing something but I figured that since I drink my tap water and it tastes fine to me, it should be fine in my coffee.

Tap water quality is very variable. In many parts of Florida for instance, tap water tastes and smells like burnt matches; tons of sulfur in that water. It's still safe to drink, but I expect people living in regions with tap water like that would get better results with bottled or filtered water.

Right, that's perfectly understandable, I'm just wondering if people think good quality tap water needs to be filtered too, e.g. maybe minerals affect extraction.

Not really.

I'm not a water snob or chemist but I've been around.

What qualifies tap as "good" is highly subjective but on the one hand you have places like Florida where the tap is desalinated and tastes like farm runoff, and then you have places like Southern California where the mineral content/hardness of the water itself makes it taste like soapy bathwater. I've even noticed it vary within the same municipality-- in two apartments I rented in Atlanta, one mile apart, one had tap that tasted fine, the other (near a swamp) tasted like sewage (we were convinced groundwater was seeping into the water main).

In cases of hard water, the brewing process seems to serve as its own distillery that separates minerals from the water. The resulting water/coffee tastes fine to me but you'll find all sorts of mineral buildup clogging your coffee maker if it doesn't have its own filtration system (my Cuisinart has a filter-on-a-stick that lowers into the water tank).

Nothing seems to make Florida water palatable though. That taste passes straight through into the coffee, like burned urine. Use distilled.

Try it out! Next time you shop, buy a gallon of distilled water and see if you prefer it

This is a simple tip that will change my life forever.

So obvious, yet so important.

What does that even mean "debris" in this context? I tried to google "major debris" and it only returned this text. Why would I deliberately buy stuff with a bunch of junk in it?

The bad coffee beans are the bunch of junk

I have a filter but I intentionally use tap water because I don't want to get used to filtered. I know that most coffee I drink outside of home will be with tap water so I don't want to spoil myself.

I have not had that problem with fussy coffee in general. When I'm home, I drink my coffee and enjoy the taste. When I'm out, I get enough caffeine to make it through the day and that's enough.