Why does distilled water not work in a keurig machine?
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I specialize in restaurant dispensed beverages. On top of the water sensing circuits others have mentioned, distilled water should have a Total Disolved Solid (TDS) of less than 5ppm. The problem with this is that a low TDS results in the coffee bean flavor being over extracted, resulting in a very bitter tasting coffee. Go the other direction with too high TDS and you will get a very weak coffee. A TDS of 100-200ppm most people would consider the ideal range. However coffee taste is VERY subjective so it may vary depending on which coffee company you take advice from. There are many factors of coffee flavor, TDS is only one of them.
If you really insist on using distilled water in the keurig, put a shake or two of salt in the water (obviously this would “un-distill” the water), and it will detect the water.
Fun fact: in the early days, McDonald’s used Reverse Osmosis (RO) water for their pre-chiller water bath. Since the water out of an RO system typically will have a low TDS, this would sometimes cause problems with the water level probes. So as a workaround, people would put bags of salt in the water bath. Since the pre chiller is made of metal, there were a lot of corrosion problems. That is when they switched to using “Blended-RO” (a mix of cartridge filtered and RO water). This worked out anyways, as RO water is slow and McDonald’s business would soon outgrow the RO systems ability to keep up.
Additionally, McDonald’s uses a remineralizer on the coffee and espresso water lines. This was to further add minerals to the coffee water to increase TDS and improve flavor.
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