Archive for the ‘Brewing Methods’ Category

How to Make the Perfect Coffee – A Lesson Learned from the WBC

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

Disclaimer: This post will not tell you how to make the perfect coffee – I was trying to think of a catchy title and “How to make your coffee taste better by making small adjustments to the brew variables from the standard method – a lesson learned from the WBC” was a little long winded. As in most cases perfection is something to aspire to, but in reality will never be achieved. If anyone can think of a better title please leave a comment.

Now I know that the WBC was quite a few weeks ago, but I thought I would write about it today as I think there is an important lesson to be learned that we can all employ when brewing at home. This lesson doesn’t just apply to brewing espresso, but to any coffee maker.

Stray from the standard brewing method

While the standard brewing method is a great starting point when learning to use a new coffee maker, it’s not a strict recipe that must be followed to the letter. To get the best out of your coffee (or to pursue perfection) you should experiment with the way you make it.
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Reverse Cafetiere Brewing Method – Keeping the Brew Temperature in the Optimum Range for Longer

Saturday, June 12th, 2010

Last week I posted about a new brewing method I was experimenting with, aimed at keeping the water temperature of the brew in the optimum extraction range (i.e. 90-95°C) for longer.

What’s wrong with the standard method?

In the standard method, you allow the water in your kettle to cool after boiling to around 95°C before adding to your cafetiere. The problem is that once the water is poured into the cafetiere, the cafetiere sucks heat out of the water until the cafetiere and water are at the same temperature. Even with pre-heating the cafetiere, inside a few seconds of adding the water, the temperature has already dropped by 4-5°C. As the temperature will continue to drop by 2-3°C every minute during the brew, the time spent in the optimum extraction range could be less than 1 minute.
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This week I’ave been mostly …

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

Jesse from the Fast Show

Jesse from BBC's the Fast Show


..drinking too much coffee!

For the last week or so, I’ve been trying to come up with a new method for brewing with a cafetiere. It all started when I was testing our new thermal cafetieres for a previous post. I notice something that is really obvious, but hadn’t crossed my mind before: when you add water to a cafetiere, the cafetiere immediately sucks some of the temperature out of the water.

Even if you pre-heat a cafetiere, its temperature is still lower than the water in your kettle (which of course you’ve left to cool down a bit after boiling). So as soon as you pour the water into the cafetiere, it absorbs heat away from the water until they’re both at the same temperature. As cafetieres are usually made from conductive materials (glass or stainless steel) this heat sync occurs within seconds of pouring water into it.

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Communicating Grind Size

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

One of the biggest problems when describing a brewing method is getting across what size of ground coffee to use. The trouble is that each grind setting on a coffee grinder will produce a range of sizes rather than one exact size.

How coffee grinders work

The reason we get a range of sizes from a grinder, is that grinders use a crushing action to break the bean into smaller pieces. On a conical burr grinder, there are two discs: a female cylindrical disc and a male dome shaped disc. Each disc has ridges (know as teeth) running across its surface, and it’s these ridges which crush the bean. Obviously crushing isn’t an exact science. Irregular sized pieces break off from the bean each time it’s crushed between the grinder’s teeth.

If you look at the cross section below of a burr grinder: the bean enters at the top and as it progresses down, the gap narrows between the two discs, breaking the bean into smaller and smaller pieces. The ground coffee cannot escape from between the grinding discs until it’s small enough to fit through the gap at the bottom (indicated by the two red arrows).
Burr grinder cross section
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How to Brew Coffee

Friday, February 5th, 2010

If you haven’t already seen this brewing guide, it’s definately worth watching. It has to be the most ingenous way to brew filter coffee.


I wonder if they’re missing a trick by not using a soiled sock to filter the coffee through?

Of course it’s a joke. But if you do try this method, and survive (with only minor gut rot!), let me know how it tasted.

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Filter Vs Cafetiere

Monday, February 1st, 2010

What is the best way to brew coffee? Well I’m afraid to say I’m sitting on the fence with this one. Each brew method produces a different taste so in my book they’re all good (well most of them). It’s like cooking an egg: fried, poached, scrambled, boiled; they all taste different.

Today, I’m going to focus on filter (sometimes called drip) and cafetiere (French press), as they are the two simplest (and cheapest) ways to brew coffee at home.

Taste Differences

Body
The cafetiere produces a rich full bodied cup in comparison to the filter method. With a cafetiere the grounds are steeped in hot water (like brewing tea) and this extracts more compounds from the coffee. Steeping extracts oils, which add a creamy/buttery rich flavour to the cup. With the filter method hardly any oils are present.

So what is body and what difference does it make to the taste? Well body refers to the feeling in your mouth. Filter coffee, with its lighter body, just coats the tongue as it gently slivers down the back of your throat. Whereas, the fuller bodied cafetiere, coats the whole of your mouth making the flavour far more enduring. A good analogy is water (with its light body) in comparison to milk (heavy bodied).
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