Have you ever gone to a coffee shop, tried whatever coffee they were brewing and thought, “Hey, I’d like to drink that at home,” only to try it and have it taste worse? No matter how many times you brew it, you can’t seem to get it right. It’s the same coffee, so why would it taste so different? It could be that the quality of the coffee is suffering due to a few factors that commonly get overlooked.
For the inaugural post of my blog, I would like to help you get the information you need to homebrew the same quality of coffee you'd get in an artisan coffee shop.
Pay attention to water quality.
Water is the main ingredient in coffee, making up 98.5% of the tasty beverage. If your water tastes bad, so will your coffee. You can have the best geisha coffee in the world, but if you have bad water the cup will be unsatisfying.
Filtering your water with a simple carbon filter, like a Brita water filter, will vastly improve the quality of your coffee at home. A good experiment might be to taste some coffee brewed with filtered water and compare it to the flavor of coffee brewed with tap water to see the difference for yourself.
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If you really want to go deep into the rabbit hole of how complicated water chemistry and coffee can be, then check out Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood’s World Barista Championship competition video where he gives a lecture on water quality in his presentation.
Make sure your coffee is freshly roasted.
Paying attention to roast dates is a way to vastly improve your coffee quality. Although it doesn’t technically have an expiration date, it most certainly goes stale. Typically coffee will go stale within a week of roasting, but it will still taste pretty good for up to about three weeks.
Properly storing your coffee will help it keep for much, much longer
Exposure to oxygen is the main cause of the staling of coffee. The more the coffee is exposed to oxygen, the more it will stale. If you keep it in an airtight container, in a dry place, away from light, it will help the coffee taste fresh for a much longer period of time.
Don’t put your coffee in the fridge/freezer. While there is dispute on whether or not this actually affects the beans themselves, it can cause cross-contamination of odors and create undesirable flavor notes.
Grind your coffee right before you brew
Buying and keeping whole bean coffee until right before you brew keeps it fresh. Remember what I said about oxygen staling coffee? Keeping it whole bean will minimize the amount of coffee mass that’s directly exposed to oxygen. If you grind it, the mass underneath the surface becomes exposed and the quicker it stales.
Get a Grinder
Grinding your coffee right before brewing is a key to homebrewing a quality cup.
There are two types of grinders that you can get, burr or blade grinders. Burr is better than blade. Hands down. Every time.
Burr grinders are superior because they have two cutting blades that fit into each other, forming a narrow space between them that evenly grinds the coffee at the set coarseness. An even grind is important, if you have pieces that differ in size, then the extraction will be uneven and affect the end product. Bigger pieces of ground coffee extract at a slower rate than finer pieces. For example, a french press requires a coarse grind and has 4-5 minute steep time, whereas espresso has a very fine grind and takes between 20-30 seconds to brew. You wouldn’t want both gradients of ground coffee in one brew.
Another advantage to burr grinders is being able to make adjustments to your grind size, which in turn allows you to experiment with different brewing devices. That pound of coffee that you got ground for “french press” won’t brew well with a v60, a regular drip coffee maker or an AeroPress.
Electric blade grinders are convenient, with the ability to grind 60 grams of coffee in seconds. However, the cheaper hand grinder is an acceptable alternative. Hand burr grinders are excellent for travel, they’re small, lightweight and cheaper, and can still make adjustments to grind. The only downsides are that you have to manually grind the beans and they're really only practical for single cup brewing.
Blade Grinders are cheaper than burr grinders, which is a plus if you're not looking to make a big investment. However, their mechanism is a chamber in which you place the beans, and inside that chamber is a horizontal blade that chops the pieces inside of it. This causes for an uneven grind, with small and big pieces, which, like I previously stated, results in lower quality results. That being said, a blade grinder is better than no grinder and for those on a budget who don’t want to spend the time on a hand grinder, it’ll do.
Get a Scale
Welcome to the world of ratios. Coffee, much like baking, involves precise measurements to be consistent, and following ratios is how we do that. Being able to weigh your beans and water is vastly more accurate than counting scoops of coffee to a pot. The recommended ratio of coffee, or best place to start, is 60 grams of coffee to 1 liter of water, which is roughly a 17:1 ratio.
From there you can experiment; I personally prefer a 16:1 ratio, but some countries have a taste for a 12:1 or up to a 19:1 ratio. With weighing your coffee, you get to experiment with ratios to see what your favorite brew strength is.
Final Drop
The world of specialty coffee and brewing coffee can be as complicated as you want it to be, but if you follow any number of these tips it will vastly improve the quality of coffee you brew at home. A big bonus of making good coffee is being able to impress your friends with your knowledge and skill.
