Tagged: coffee

A Seventh Way to Brew Coffee

Brewing coffee has been a daily activity for me for almost twenty years. At first I was content with drinking a cup of flavored coffee with enough milk and sugar to render the coffee itself undetectable. But over the years, my taste and expectations for coffee has changed, and I have been using different methods to brew a cup of joe.

Those methods have included the following:

Drip

This might be the most common method for brewing coffee with a machine. Almost everyone has done it, and while it is certainly convenient, it almost never produces good coffee, partly because the water is not hot enough.

Espresso machine

One of the first appliances I had my mom buy for me when I left for college was a $60 Krups espresso machine. It was a perfectly servicable way to brew coffee, except that after several moves, including a cross-country one, I have no idea where I lost it. I also found that my own coffee was too bitter, but that’s because I didn’t know much about coffee, such as tamping, steam pressure, and properly “pulling the shot” to get crema.

French press pot

The first sign of a serious coffee drinker is that he or she owns press pot. It is often the final step in a coffee drinker’s evolution. What I really like about the press pot, and all of the subsequent methods of brewing I catalog here, is that you never have to spend much money on a machine to get a good brew.

About 2002, I moved on to a press pot. My coffee was good enough, but now I realize that the water probably was too hot for brewing with a press pot and that my grounds were bad because, until 2004 or so, I ground my coffee with a blade grinder. When I bought a burr grinder, my coffee changed dramatically because those grinders will produced evenly ground coffee. Since then, I can almost always get a really good cup of coffee from a press pot.

Slow-pour drip

Around 2002, a roommate of mine had one of those plastic, cone filter holders that would hold your grounds. It’s basically the same concept as the drip method, but instead of requiring an electric drip coffee maker, you only need a kettle and a stove. It’s a very simple and effective way of brewing coffee provided your water is really hot, that you use a fine grind, and that you pour the water slowly and evenly over the grounds. If someone recently charged you a mint to make coffee this way, you stumbled on to the pour-over trend. Be sure you watch them make it. You’re paying for the show.

Siphon pot

This method was completely foreign to me until I was told about it about two years ago. Until I broke it, I had a stovetop vacuum coffee maker. It uses water pressure for just-hot-enough water to escape a heated chamber to another chamber with coffee grounds. After removing the pot from the heat source, a vacuum siphons the coffee through a filter and produces a very smooth cup of coffee.

Cold brew

Summer has always been a hard time to drink hot coffee. For years I used to make iced coffee by brewing coffee at double strength and pouring it over ice cubes. But about two summers ago, it became impossible to do that because having the stove became intolerable. Cold brewing makes great coffee without requiring any heat. Over time, I settled on using the New York Times ratio: two parts course coffee grounds to nine parts of room-temperature water. I leave the grounds in a Mason jar for fifteen hours. Straining it, yields a double-strength coffee mixture that you can pour into a half-glass of ice water.

Regardless of what brewing method you use, you cannot make a good cup of coffee without a burr grinder. You also need freshly ground coffee and filtered tap water at the correct temperature, both of which depend on your particular brewing method.


Earlier today, I used yet another method to brew coffee. After hearing and reading about it among a particularly finicky set of coffee drinkers, I brewed using an AeroPress. This method produces espresso, which I normally don’t drink, so once I figure out how to make a proper Americano, I’ll report on my experience with the AeroPress.

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At Last… It’s Coffee Season

IMG_3422

Each Friday, local NPR powerhouse WNYC runs a segment about seasonal food, cleverly titled “Last Chance Foods.” Today, they covered coffee, its preparation, its storage, and its seasonality.

They covered many of the basics that I have for many years observed in my daily quest for a great cup.

  1. the specific brewing method matters very little other than yielding one’s personal preference
  2. storing coffee in the refrigerator or freezer is not a good idea
  3. you can only achieve properly ground coffee using a burr grinder
  4. your water must be at the right temperature, around 195-205°

However the new tidbit for me was that coffee has seasons, albeit very long ones. That makes a lot of sense since a coffee bean is like a cherry, which we all know have very distinct growing season.

I hope that seasonality will be something that consumers will consider when drinking their next cup. I think it’ll be a boon for smaller coffee shops around here since we’ve seen that Big Food retailers struggle with seasonality and this marks a good opportunity for the more artisanal coffee purveyors in this city.

And if you’re wondering if your coffee is in season, rest assured “there will never be a month when in-season coffee is not available though.”

Cheers!

Brewing Coffee with a Vacuum Coffee Maker

About a year ago, I received as a Christmas gift a vacuum coffee maker. I was very excited about brewing coffee with it, except that I could not find a set of instructions or best practices. For one thing, there are too many variables to create a definitive step-by-step process. Some of these variables included:

  • the coarseness of the coffee grounds,
  • whether to start with ice cold water,
  • whether to place the top chamber before I heat the water
    • if not, at what water temperature should I place the top chamber
  • the duration that I leave the coffee maker on the heat source

In any case, you have to start with freshly drawn, filtered water, and you have to grind your coffee just before you brew the coffee. You can’t make good coffee without good water or without freshly ground beans.

After several weeks of experimenting, I came up with a pretty good solution, and it involves the following steps:

  • Grind the beans to a medium-coarse ground, just a bit more find than the press-pot grind
  • Use room-temperature, filtered water
  • Add the coffee-ground chamber after the water reaches a rolling boil (95° C and 185° F)
  • Brew on the stove for about three minutes and then remove from the heat source

You can see this process in the video I made last winter.

My Broken Bodum Santos Siphon Coffee Maker

I’m glad I documented the process because I broke the carafe a few months ago. I have since reverted to brewing coffee with a press pot because I didn’t want to buy a $60 replacement carafe. Should I ever bite the bullet and get a replacement, it would have been pretty unlikely that I would have remembered how to brew coffee without this video.

Does it work for you?

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Summer Cocktail: Cold-Brewed Coffee

A mason jar full of cold brew coffee

During last summer’s heat wave throughout the Northeast, I didn’t want to turn on the stove for anything. Not even to make coffee. That’s when I turned to cold brewing coffee. After nearly a year of finessing the process, here’s what I do today:

I prefer using blends rather than single origin coffee beans because they have a more complex flavor profile. At first, I was using expensive coffee beans, which were great, but I found that even inexpensive beans, such as Joe’s blend from Trader Joes ($4.99 for a 12 oz. can), worked just as well. Moreover, I would recommend using light roasts, rather than a dark roast, to allow the natural flavors of the bean to come through.

Using one of those giant 64 oz. mason jars, add coarsely ground coffee. To get the 9:2 ratio that everyone recommends, fill it with coffee ground so that it reaches halfway between the 250 and 500 ml. lines on “metric side” the jar. Fill the rest of the jar with water, stir aggressively, and cap the jar. For the next few minutes, shake the jar so that the grounds don’t settle in one place. Place jar in refrigerator for about 13-15 hours. Using a strainer with a fine mesh, filter the coffee into another large jar. The resulting mixture needs to be diluted with an equal amount of ice water.

The coffee should have no bitterness and should bring out the flavors of the beans. It in fact is so sweet that you don’t need to add milk, sugar, or anything to “soften” the brew. The first time I had this, it was the most delicious coffee I had ever had. There really is no going back to hot-brewed coffee in the summer.

My Kind of Freeganism

Free Coffee

First, let me say that I didn’t take this out of the trash. I didn’t jump into a dumpster and fish it out from a stack of stale muffins.

Nope, I have a source at one of the dozens of Stumptown brewing outlets here in New York, and evidently, they had some overage. It turns out that Stumptown won’t let any of their vendors sell brewed coffee from beans that were roasted more than two weeks ago. (For the uninitiated, “two-week” old coffee is hardly old so that’s a pretty good commitment to freshness, although that explains the high retail price.)

Anyway, said source came through with a bag of the coffee that was a wee bit past Stumptown’s own freshness standards. If the “1/26” on the bag is the discard date, that means it was roasted around January 12. (The date could also be the roasting date, in which case that’s even better.) Generally speaking, any coffee that’s less than two months past roasting is good to go as long its kept at room temperature and in an air tight container. By the looks of it, there’s about 2 1/2 pounds left of the 5 lb. bag. Usually, I brew about 12 oz of coffee beans each week, meaning that I’ll have to pick up the pace to finish it by March 12.

But the best news is that this bag will save me about $50 in Stumptown coffee beans, and untold sums of money over buying brewed coffee.