Average ‘Joe’ to coffee Pro

The perfect brew?

have you been struggling to get that perfect brew at home? Tried all the fancy recommendations but still cant get a good cup of coffee. Well your not alone. Great coffee brewing takes some perseverance, and attention to the finer details, and with practice you can make a fantastic brew every time. But you need to breakdown all of the details so that you can understand how they each contribute to your cup of coffee.

First lets talk about the water.  Brewed coffee is approximately 95% water, so it is important to understand what role water plays in your beverage. Water also has those tiny minerals that during the coffee brewing process bond with the coffee, Hence the more minerals in your water the higher extraction you will achieve from your coffee. Very important to understand this relationship with different waters and their mineral content. Now we don’t have to scientifically test water, but I think we all agree that if we take the same coffee, ground the same way and brew it in Vail Co, then tested it in New York you would have two entirely different flavors from the same ground coffee.

Water is the foundation for the coffee flavor if it smells funny before you brew with it, chances are your coffee will have a funny smell too. So if you use tap water be sure its does not have any offending odors. If you must use a bottled water product — find the one with the highest mineral content.

The grind. Several different issues involved with grinding coffee. Over extraction is the biggest killer of great coffee flavor, and generally this is a result (not always) of poor coffee ginding.  That is why you will see some coffee articles recommend you grind it at home for freshness, others will tell you to buy coffee that is pre-ground, why all the fuss about the grind?   Why does my local grocery store have such a big display of  Whole bean coffees? Well believe it or not this is the hardest part about coffee brewing, and I have 3 entirely different recommendations depending on your desire to find the best cup of coffee.

For the novice: buy only pre-ground (autodrip only) coffees. These coffees go through an industrial grinding mill, that typically produces a excellent distribution of granule sizes giving you a more consistent brewing result. You should modify the water, brewing method (drip, french press) and coffee to water ratio to suite your tastes.

For the Apprentice: grind coffee at the grocery store of specialty coffee shop. These grinders can give you a resonable grind when set to autodrip. Hopefully your grocery store has two grinders one for Flavored coffees and one for non-flavored coffees, be sure to smell under the hopper cover of the grinder to ensure it is not tainted with flavoring if you grinding at the grocery store. If you insist on grinding your own coffee at home with a blade grinder or even a small gear grinder, take the time to understand how grind size changes the flavor and bitterness of the brew. Fundamentally you want the amount of water contact time with your coffee to be proportional with the size of the granduales. For example a small grind (espress0) means small amount of time for contact 25-20 sec. A auto drip coffee brewer works anywhere from 3 minutes to 8 minutes so your coffee grind should be auto drip but you can tweak it smaller grind size if your coffee maker is fast and if your coffee maker brews slower you will probably want to make it a bit larger grind size, so you don’t over extract the coffee.

for the coffee pro: will generally have coffee ground at the store (specialty or grocery) or only have fresh coffee in his home (less than 2 weeks old). Might have a nice blade or gear grinder, but knows that introduces another varible in the overall mix of coffee making, and it takes practice and understanding of proper operation of grinding to achieve consistent results.

Understanding the water and the grind size is the biggest area of misconceptions about brewing the perfect cup. I will spend more time on these important subjects but also cover in the future the other items that can hinder you from getting that perfect brew at home or work.

Cheers

Sam

serving over 9.6 million cups of coffee a day, providing instrucitonal coffee information to industry leaders and folks around North America

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