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.
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.
