Cafetiere, or if you prefer, french press coffee makers have been in the news a bit lately. Douwe Egberts recently published a survey revealing that, even though the average Briton spend £15,000 in a lifetime in coffee shops, a staggering 75% don’t use a cafetiere: 38% owned one but avoided using it as they thought they were too complicated; whilst another 37% per cent didn’t even know how to use one.
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Seeing as the festive season tends to be a boozy one, I thought it would be the perfect time to post a recipe for Irish Coffee.

Irish Coffee is said to have originated at Shannon International Airport. The story goes that when some American passengers disembarked from their plane on a miserable winter’s evening, sometime during the 1940s, the bartender, John Sheridan, added whiskey to their coffee to help warm them up. When asked whether the coffee was Brazilian, Sheridan replied “No its Irish Coffee”.
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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 (french press). 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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..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 (french press) 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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