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Neither this study nor the previous one from the same authors seems to look at the water. I would have thought the hardness of the water also influences what grows in the starter. Especially with white flour, which has few minerals.

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I'd never thought about the water.. my wife started making sourdough bread a year ago, and now she's making them all the time.. extremely tasty. Her starter always seems to grow to nearly triple size. She uses mostly rye for that, I think, but she varies stuff. The water around here has basically zero hardness. There's never any need to remove calcium from anything, ever. Never seen any calcium deposits, unlike when I lived in Italy.

Have you done any experiments on this? Using hard water vs demineralised? I have no idea if this is a thing that's spoken about in the Sourdough baking world.

I find that my sourdough starter’s smell is noticeably more yogurty (lactic acid) and less tangy (acetic) when I add a tiny amount of food grade calcium to the water. There’s a similar effect on the final bread as well, but there are other factors (eg fermentation time/temperature) that probably have a bigger effect on the final loaf.

I believe the calcium feeds the lactic acid producing bacteria, favoring their growth.

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