by Jasonscheltus » Sun Oct 19, 2008 9:33 pm
Boiling water won't get rid of the chlorine. And most of the bacteria that severely affect humans will be killed off before it hits your tap. For coffee, the amount of other "stuff" attached to the water seems to be more important. Using filtered water instead of tap water makes a huge difference to the taste in the cup, and how much stuff is filtered out of the water makes a difference.
There have been arguments against actually boiling the water before letting it cool (tea-heads have said that the amount of oxygen in the water has an affect on extraction of tea, and obviously the more you boil water the less O2 is in the water), but I have never experience the discrepancy.
Fixing a kettle to "not-boil" sounds like a sensible idea, I've been thinking about ways to do this too. I thought perhaps attaching one of Espresso Parts North West's La Marzocco PID kits to a standard water boiler would be a good idea, if not somewhat overkill. They're not cheap though, 150 quid if I remember, you can buy quite a few kettles with that money...
Kettles must have some kind of rudimentary thermostat (or pressure stat?), and I'd reckon that maybe some of these could be modified.
Keep us posted on progress!