It should be mildly unsettling that by 2026 we still don't agree upon the color of coffee, or at least, the color of roast coffee.

Coffee beans go through as extensive a process as any food on the planet when it comes to translating what grows on the tree to what brews in your cup. They transform from a red ripe cherry to a little green bean to a roasted, lovely chocolatey (or cinnamon, or greasy black) bean that you then grind up and brew with.

The problem is in the roasting part. We all agree that you start with a coffee bean (technically a seed) that's green. We agree that in the beginning parts of the roast, as moisture is driven out of the bean and its amino acids and sugars start browning in what's called the Maillard reaction, the coffee bean starts to turn yellow.

After that, pandemonium.

The Juliet Coffee Water System (JCWS) needs a brain. You can't just have all those pumps and filters and tanks doing their own thing whenever they want; you'd end up with puddles and pools of the kind of water you wouldn't feed to a stray opossum.

That "brain" to control everything is called a PLC, or Programmable Logic Controller, and like all brains, it needs protection.

The JWCS needs 3 pumps; one to push water across the RO membrane, one to move water from the permeate tank (clean RO produced water) to the treated tank (where the minerals have been dosed in), and one to push water to the coffee machine.

The first two were found and bought in the first two weeks, but the third one took a little longer to find.

It's not that the third pump was hard to find, it's just that the pumps I need don't come on the market super often, so I just had to be patient.

As I've said before, the idea of taking what was once a really expensive, highly engineered piece of kit and using it in a system that could never really justify buying new, but could greatly benefit from industrial-level reliability and performance, is kind of a fetish of mine.

I've done it with everything from high-altitude thermal vacuum chambers to the alternator on a Lexus for an exercise sled; I LOVE using badass rugged older gear in new projects.

Water for coffee at scale is expensive and complicated, but it is not a mystery.

The basic sequence is:

1. Protect the treatment equipment.
2. Remove the stuff in your source water you don't want.
3. Make a clean blank slate.
4. Add back exactly what you do want.
5. Deliver that finished water at the right pressure.

We Passed That Exit An Hour Ago​

The Juliet Coffee Water System (JCWS) is as different from anything you can buy off the shelf for a coffee shop as a T-rex is from a chicken. It is the result of a batshit crazy obsession with precisely making water for coffee at scale.