SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Smelling samples of coffee to make sure they select the best beans for their customers is something Robert Watson says is a lot of fun, but also serious business.

“This is a weird one. Timor? Indonesian. Yeah, this is a weird one. I’ve never tasted coffee from here,” said Watson, owner of Camellia Coffee in downtown Sacramento.

The beans may give the distinct flavor, but as Watson will tell you, water is pivotal in creating the perfect cup — and it makes up most of a cup of coffee.

“It’s like almost 99%. It’s very, very, important,” he said.

For Camellia Coffee and every business in Sacramento, a healthy supply of water is a must.

Leaders around the Sacramento area are discussing a new agreement around water supply from the area’s major drinking water source, the American River, called the Water Forum Agreement 2.0.

The agreement centers on making sure everyone, from residents to businesses, to the wildlife, has enough water in the future.

The Water Forum’s Executive Director Jessica Law said climate change will drastically change when and how the area receives its water, so a new agreement needs to be signed in order for stakeholders to work toward new water management methods.

“In the future, it’s more likely that we will have less snowpack and more rain that’s coming in. And what that means is you’ll have more run-off earlier in the year. So water’s not sitting up in the mountains, in the nice snowbank, and then sort of gently flowing down the hills in spring,” Law said.

The state relies heavily on water captured in reservoirs.

Law said a comprehensive study by the Water Forum’s engineers and engineering company HDR modeled future water coming two to four months earlier — around January — in wet years from rain, but droughts also will become more frequent and longer, stretching four to six years. The droughts would also cause “dead pooling” in the Folsom reservoir, meaning water levels too low to divert water out of.

“Dead pool is no longer a concept. Dead pool is something that the region was faced with in the last drought as a very real possibility of what could happen and I think we’re looking at that going forward,” Law said.

Solutions to the capture and storage issues she reported are part of the agreement.

“There’s a project that’s being put together by the regional water authority, or RWA, it’s called the groundwater bank. They’ve done a tremendous amount of work looking at the groundwater systems in the region and really thinking about how you can create that sharing between surface water and groundwater,” Law said.

That’s good news for Watson and the rest of Sacramento.

“There’s so much care going into getting the coffee here and then making the actual coffee. The fact that coffee is almost 99% water, you know you should care about your water,” Watson said.

Robert said they’ll continue to take with their product and hoping the same from leaders on water management.