How to make good coffee - The Beginner's Guide
All the talk about gourmet single estate coffee, coffee blends, types of coffee beans, fair trade organic coffee, “cupping coffee” and on and on and on when all you want is a simple cup of good tasting coffee. Here’s some clear practical advice about coffee making for beginners. We all have to start at the beginning and if you want to explore the more exotic coffee lore later it’s all here on how-to-make-coffee-great.com But let’s pretend we are just starting out and want to make a decent tasting cup. It’s not as hard as it seems and a few simple fundamentals will get you compliments you never expected. People like good tasting coffee and don’t often get it so… 1. How to make good coffee-Get a good coffee machine. It doesn’t need to be expensive but it needs to work properly. If you just want something that’s pretty well guaranteed to produce one great cup of coffee fast and easy with no cleanup try the latest coffee craze. One cup coffee makers are outselling conventional machines by a wide margin and for good reason. My wife who loves good coffee but doesn’t want anything to do with measuring or grinding loves our Keurig Elite. For those of us including myself of a more conventional bent (although I confess I use the Keurig for a quick cup when I am in a hurry and it makes a darn fine coffee), there are other options. Most beginners are familiar with and start out with a drip machine made famous by Mr. Coffee. The problem with these machines is that a lot of the cheaper ones don’t heat up the water hot enough to get real flavor out of the ground beans. Another problem is that any leftover coffee sits on a burner and after a while the coffee tastes pretty bad. So you need one that is going to heat up the coffee to about 195 to 205 degrees Fahrenheit. Personally I favor the French Press which is pretty easy to use for a beginner and makes arguably the best tasting coffee. You can really impress your guests with this one and you’ll likely get hooked on the flavor yourself. It’s cheap and unless you drop it it’ll last forever. If you decide to try it a good trick is to heat up your kettle to boiling –then let it sit for a minute until the water cools before you add it to the ground beans in the pot. Two to three minutes later you’ll be sipping mighty fine coffee. 2. How to make good coffee-The Main Ingredient is Water! Use Filtered Tap Water. Use cold water from your tap if your water is not too unpleasant tasting and run it for a minute or so you get fresh water that hasn’t been sitting around in your pipes where it can pick up all sorts of contaminants that will make a difference in taste. Then filter it with a charcoal filtration filter. We use a Brita and it’s economical and takes out all the chlorine taste as well as lead and other metals. Fresh filtered water will make a huge difference in the final brew which is about 98% water! The only time I would recommend bottled water is if you can’t drink your tap water because it tastes so bad. One time, I went to a small town in Ontario, Canada and their water tasted like sulfur water. No one was drinking that stuff! But don’t use distilled water – it has no minerals at all and that will affect the taste too. 3. How to make good coffee-Get fresh beans. What I like to do is find a small coffee shop that roasts their own beans. Then get to know the owners or baristas and find out which beans are freshest. Buy no more than you can use in a week as beans stale anywhere from 3-7 days according to experts. The guys I buy from roast their own beans from small coop farms and the beans are organic and fair trade. These beans foam like crazy when I brew them in my French Press and that’s the carbon monoxide from a fresh roasted bean. If it doesn’t foam you know it’s stale beans. Failing that option you can buy fresh roasted beans on the internet but it can be a little pricy with shipping included. So then I like to find beans that have been packaged with one way valves (so the gas can escape – at least I know they were packaged fresh) and I buy them some place there’s a fast turnover. Once again the amount of foam is how I judge freshness. Freshness is more important than the price or quality of beans. Expensive stale beans still taste bad and usually bitter. A fresh bean will elicit accolades from you friends and family. 4. How to make good coffee-Grind them yourself just before you brew the coffee. I used to use a blade grinder for many years but I switched to a burr grinder. The blade was a lot cheaper but the burr is better. Get one if you can afford one. Another great feature of mine is that it electronically measures and grinds the beans to the precise grind I need. No more measuring out beans or should I say mismeasuring and the perfect grind every time. It’s basically a no brainer. So now you know how to make good coffee. If you want the perfect cup you may want to look into the more advanced areas of this website. Who knows maybe you’ll be roasting your own beans, cupping and pursuing rare single estate coffees. It can be a lot of fun and of course the perfect cup is the real reward…. |
