Currently I make my coffee in a French Press. Beans are ground using a bodum burr grinder. I heat water in a kettle on my stove.
I can’t afford new equipment (starving college student who already has a couple of pricey hobbies). What can I do to maximize my enjoyment here? I’ve got a good supply of beans from a local roaster. The one thing I’m thinking is temperature control - I let the kettle come to a boil then let it sit for a minute or so before pouring; I’m betting the water is coming out way hot.
I wouldn’t worry too much about water temp–it will drop 5-10 degrees when you pour it into the press, even if it’s right off the boil. In fact, some people like to pre-warm the press with hot water, just to keep the temperature from dropping too much while brewing. 196-204 is the range you want.
Good quality beans and water at the correct temperature are most of what you need for a good cup of coffee. Aside from a good grinder, you don’t need to spend a lot of money on equipment.
You’re not missing anything as far as I can tell. Other than some sort of superscience heat control you’re making the same cup of coffee that an $11,000 Clover machine makes. The best thing you can do is start branching out in bean type, roast, and grind and see if you can perfect a particular variety. Or get a bread machine and make your own roaster, that might be a nice project.
I have a couple of reusable Kcups that I’ve experimented with. I got some Starbucks coffee as a gift and tried that, plus coffee I bought myself.
The plus- it’s the perfect temperature every time. It does in fact taste like the coffee you used, no weird taste effects.
The downside, for me- Assembling the custom Kcup then cleaing it afterwards kinda kills the advantage of using the Keurig in the first place. It’s quicker and easier to just use the French press overall in that case.
So what I’m doing now is using the Keurig to provide the hot water, then using that hot water in the French press.
What I need now is a kitchen scale. I’ve experimented with different amounts of coffee and different amounts of water in my mug, but this is all by eye and I just know I’m missing out by using too much/little of one or the other.
uhmmm…don’t refrigerate/freeze your coffee. It should be room temp when it is made. Make your coffee stronger than you would think it should be…lots of flavor is left in the grounds.
Using not enough grounds is something that I think a lot of people do. I have this argument with my parents–and my in-laws–all the time. They all use, like, maybe half (or less!) of what they should be using in their drip machine. The reason: they don’t like strong coffee. But what they don’t realize is that using not enough grounds with too much water leads to overextraction, which in turn brings out a lot of bitter and astringent flavors and makes coffee taste generally unpleasant. They also often cite Starbucks as an example of coffee that is too strong for them, so I suspect that the “strength” attribute that they don’t like has more to do with the darkness of the roast than the preparation.
After some experimentation, we settled on using 25 grams of coffee for a 10 oz. cup doing pour-over. The parents and in-laws seem to like the coffee that we make, despite the fact that we use an approximately three times greater ratio of coffee to water than they do.
Most older people have never had a good cup of coffee in their lives. Raised on Folgers, they’re so used to bitter, rancid preground crud that if you do give them a proper cup of coffee they kill it with cream and sugar. I’m going to have to bring my gear into the office, I miss the good stuff.
When my mom visits I make coffee (french press usually) according to the ratio I’ve always used–basically two tablespoons grounds for every six ounces of water–which is way stronger than she’s used to. But I give her extra hot water (and heated milk) on the side so she can adjust each cup to her liking.
She spends the rest of the year talking about how much she misses my coffee.
The Starbucks near the top of the DC Beltway (187 for the locals) has a Clover machine and finally got it up and running.
After a few tries, I’ve come to the sad conclusion that even a $11K machine can’t save Starbucks from their insistence on roasting everything on the scale of “Light(almost burnt) to Dark(charcoal)”.
Speaking of kit though - since even I tend to balk at drinking hot coffee in a MD summer, I’ve been eyeing some cold brew systems to make iced coffee. I’ve had a Toddy before (lost it in a move), but it’s a bit of clutter, so I was eyeing a Hourglass System(Amazon.com). Anyone have any experience with them?
Coffee dorkdom update, due to clumsy dork factors. I ended up not exactly downgrading, but more of a sidegrading again, because of dropping the Twist, which clearly knocked some crucial bits of the valving off kilter to the point where it didn’t work particularly well anymore. So I did some wailing and rending of garments, mourned it, and moved on.
Back to using the Aeropress, but I recently picked up a metal filter for it instead of using the little disposable paper ones, and damned if it doesn’t make an even better cup now. So for right now, my coffee dork levels have happily stabilized at good enough. Stop tempting me to do some sort of home-roasting operation.
Does that make the aeropress a little more inconvenient to use? One of the great things about the aeropress is ease of ejecting the coffee-puck. Does that get harder when you have to worry about the metal filter?
I guess about half the time the filter sticks to the basket portion, and otherwise you can just peel if off the puck itself before ejecting? I am aware this concern makes me sound like the laziest person on earth.
Oh, I’m fully in favor of being lazy. It’s a big part of why my coffee dork levels have hit a steady state with current setup.
I would rate it just about one percent more fiddly, if you’re in the habit of just unscrewing it directly over the trash and ejecting. Now, you must take care to hold it upside down while unscrewing; the filter doesn’t really cling to either base or coffee puck. So: unscrew upside down, pluck the filter off the puck, then eject as normal.
The filter rinses easily, and you can just push water through it to make sure the holes stay unclogged. Of course that’s more than you need to do for paper, but my own high laziness factors tolerate it just fine.
You do get a bit more grit in the coffee, but nothing unreasonable. That may be an area where it’s important to have a decentish burr grinder though, to minimize the amount of coffee dust small enough to get through. It handles finely ground well, though.
Ah, now that makes sense. I’ve always been anti- Aero (and god knows you people are as bad as the Big Green Egg owners) because the paper traps the oils. With a metal filter I see no issue with it.
I’ve always been skeptical of the people who cry foul about the oils in the aeropress (mostly the people who use it upside down to compensate), but it’d be really interesting to get a blind taste test with the metal filter vs. paper, assuming it hasn’t been done and published somewhere.
1. Won’t the AeroPress’ paper filter remove important oils that contribute to flavor that pass through the metal filters in my French press and my espresso machine?
We conducted blind-tasting tests with espresso and French press coffee lovers. They tasted paper-filtered AeroPress brew and metal-filtered brew – made with espresso filters and custom filters which were about three times finer. Every single taster preferred the paper-filtered brew.
This is not surprising, in light of the fact that the fine particles which pass through metal filters are quite bitter.
In the book Coffee - A Guide to Buying Brewing and Enjoying, renowned coffee author Kenneth Davids wrote about making drip coffee with metal filters;
“…you may not like coffee made with these filters as much as you like coffee brewed with paper filters. The mesh allows a good deal of sediment and colloids to enter the brewed coffee, which gives it a heavy, often gritty taste, closer in style to French-press coffee.”
Also, from the same book and page;
“A note on Filter Papers
Virtually all white filter papers manufactured today are whitened without use of dioxin, a carcinogen that was used in bleaching paper through the late 1980’s. For this reason, I feel confident in recommending white papers in preference to brown, which imparts a cardboardy taste to the brewed water and which may harbor some dubious chemicals of their own, including tars.”
Yeah, I know that this is getting close to Capulet and Montague-level provocation, but I’m not a huge fan of all the extra oils that you get in a cup of French press. I generally prefer filter coffee; my daily preparation method is pour-over, and I find that properly done, it provides just as rich a cup, without the grit or heavy mouthfeel. This is a strictly subjective thing, I know–I’m not going to call out the French press lovers as being wrong, or anything. It’s just not for me.
The key with filter coffee is to use the right kind of filters, and also to rinse them with hot water before use. This helps to eliminate paper taste, which is the main issue that you are likely to encounter with filter coffee, especially if you are brewing a cup at a time like I do. In my experience: white filters tend to have less paper taste than the unbleached brown variety (sorry, planet). Melitta makes a bamboo filter that has even less paper taste, and the Bonmac Kenef filters are the best that I’ve ever found. They are made from a fast-growing, renewable hemp-like plant (you’re back in business, planet!), and once rinsed, impart no noticeable flavor to the coffee at all. Nobody sells them locally, though, and it’s a Japanese product, so you can only get them from a few source online (Blue Bottle, Sweet Marias). Hario’s filters are good, too, but only work with the Hario-style filter cones.
That’s probably for the best. I’m cool with it, but I understand that Houngan is extremely skilled with a revolver and has a mouthful of coffee oil, and that’s a dangerous combination.
