Commentary: Hipsters manage to ruin coffee

If anything is immune to the ruination caused by the smugness of hipsters it's the indestructible awesomeness of coffee, right?

Wrong.

Because your water's not good enough, average Joe. And hipsters, in their infinite wisdom about all things cool and superior, are here to help. Enter Third Wave Water, a $10 pouch of capsules that change normal tap water into something much more sophisticated so that coffee can stop wasting everyone's time and achieve its optimal flavor.

The company offers a helpful explainer that states why normal tap water is inferior: "The terroir of water is much like that of coffee. Where the soil type, rainfall, and solar intensity effect the flavor of coffee; the flavor of water comes from subterranean minerals like dolomite, halite and limestone."

And then they — also helpfully — answer the question of what should be in water to make the "perfect" coffee.  And dontcha know, they have just the cure for boring, less than optimum old tap water. In convenient pill form, too!

As The Independent dryly puts it:

While there is undoubtedly some science behind it – [founders Taylor Minor, of Ohio’s Telemetry Roasters, and Charles Nick, of The Wright Cup] referenced the Speciality Coffee Association of America’s standards for water quality – this has to be one of the nerdiest, and arguably futile, conversations happening in the coffee world right now.

But maybe that's too harsh. The idea of "dehydrated water" is kind of cool, in a "how do we get potable water to places in the world that don't have enough clean water to drink" kind of way.

In the meantime, hipsters can test the technology by donating to the Kickstarter — scheduled to go live next month — and test the method at $1 a capsule in search of the perfect cup of joe.