Posts Tagged ‘filter coffee’

My Miserable Grass

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

miserable grassLast month I wrote a post on whether instant coffee was really better for the environment than filter. Now I wasn’t negative about environmental issues, but I thought I should still play it safe and write something environmentally friendly, to avoid an arrest warrant being issued by the environmental police.

As a coffee lover, I drink a lot of coffee and so accumulate a lot of used coffee grounds. Now usually I just dump these in my garden waste bin and let the council take care of it. But I’ve been thinking, there must be some better use for them.

From researching on the internet it seems many people actually use their coffee grounds on their garden. Now I’m pretty sure that after being roasted and brewed, grounds will have little nutritional value to add to soil – it’s not going to be high in nitrogen, phosphorus or potassium (NPK). But as grounds are quite similar in texture to sand they may help improve the soil structure, particularly if you have clay soil.
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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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Is Instant Coffee Really Better for the Environment?

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

According to a recent report in New Scientist, instant coffee is better for the environment than filter coffee. Dr Dave Reay has calculated that filter coffee has a much larger carbon footprint than its instant counterpart.

I must say I’m a little confused with the report’s findings. Surely as instant coffee undergoes far more processes than filter coffee, before it reaches our cup, that it would require more energy to produce. Essentially, instant coffee is second-hand coffee: it’s brewed in a factory, then dehydrated before being aromatised and packaged, ready to be brewed again by the end consumer.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to read the original report (its not available for free on the internet), just an article on it in the Telegraph. So I’m not entirely sure what assumptions Dr Reay has based his calculations on. It would be interesting to know what he classes as an average cup of filter coffee.
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