Making Better Coffee - Vlog #1

Making Better Coffee

Sounds pretty simple right? It is with these simple, often forgotten steps. The three most important aspects of brewing a great cup of coffee are grinding, water, and good, fresh roasted coffee. These aspects branch out into concepts that become more important the more obsessed you are with your daily ritual, and in this blog, we’ll dive into a few of those things.

Freshness Matters - STOP drinking STALE coffee!

The easiest change you can make to up your coffee game is quite simply to buy better coffee. “Better” means fresh roasted by people who care about what they are doing. Even if you completely ignore the other aspects of brewing a great cup of coffee, you are still going to get better results with fresh coffee. Ideally, this means finishing your bag of coffee within a 2 or 3 weeks, but if you’re new to specialty coffee game, you will still probably be perfectly fine with drinking 1-2 month old coffee that has been properly stored. A cool, dry, dark place is best for coffee storage – airtight/vacuum seal containers are even better.

Browse our selection of coffees you can have customized and roasted FRESH to your taste: https://coffeeicon.com/roast-your-coffee/

Ground vs. Whole Bean Coffee?

Grinding your coffee immediately prior to brewing is nearly as important – oxygen takes time to penetrate all the way through whole bean coffee, and there are oils inside and outside of the bean to help protect it from oxygen, which means that ground coffee goes stale faster than whole bean coffee. It is for this same reason that you do not want to freeze ground coffee – coffee absorbs aromas and flavors around it, and ground coffee absorbs them quicker.

If you do not have a decent grinder and are going to be finishing you bag of coffee in a week or less, it is probably better to have your coffee ground where you purchased it. Blade grinders are not worth using – they chop the beans into uneven pieces, creating a lot of fine coffee dust that lends to bitter flavors. The blades heat up as well, which can lead to a burnt taste in the cup. Burr grinders are the way to go, but even those are unreliable until you reach a price point of around $50-$100 for hand crank grinders and $150-$200 for electric grinders. A proper espresso grinder starts around twice as much – these grinders need to be capable of a finer, even more consistent grind.

Water Quality = Tasty Coffee!

You should be using filtered water in every possible instance – a Brita pitcher works fine for home use. This filters out any impurities that may affect the taste of your coffee. Additionally, the temperature needs to be at least 196 degrees (F) to extract properly, but no more than 205 degrees (F) to avoid burned, bitter tastes. For this reason, if you use an automatic coffee maker, make sure to purchase one certified by the SCAA (Specialty Coffee Association of America) or you will wind up with an over or under-extracted cup of coffee.

Bonus Tip: Manual Brewing for Precision Flavor

Using a manual method such as an Aeropress, French press, or one of the various pour-over methods (Chemex, Kalita, Hario) can often make a superior cup of coffee, but there are a few essential pieces of equipment associated with it that can also be used to up your coffee game with an automatic machine. Weighing your coffee with a digital scale is ideal, as well as weight the amount of water you are using so that you can find out the ideal water to coffee ratio. If you are using paper filters, you will want wet the filter with hot water first – this removes the “papery” taste. If you are using a pour over device, you will want a gooseneck kettle to help control the flow of the water, and you will want to use a spiral motion while pouring. Blooming your coffee is especially important with the freshest coffees that are still degassing, as the CO2 coming from the grounds can mess with the brewing process and lead to under extraction.