Have you ever brewed a cup of coffee so wonderful, you thought, "This is the best coffee I've ever had..."only to attempt to recreate it and fail miserably? I know I have.
Before I committed to learning all I could about coffee, I felt that my ability to produce a professional level extraction was always going to be hindered by my lack of experience, lack of ability to purchase expensive brewing equipment or access to high quality specialty coffee.
But over the years I’ve learned that brewing a great cup of coffee really boils down to 5 key concepts. Understanding these concepts and how they interact with one another really helped me to refine my brewing process, and make an incredible cup time and again.
**(Full Disclosure: After several years brewing Chemex and V60, hours and hours of extraction, weighing, grinding, and modifying all the minutiae to brew a perfect cup, I’ve more or less ditched that practice at home in favor of time. With two kids, I don’t have the focus or energy to divest into a morning manual brew. Instead we brew on our Cuisinart drip machine. We do what we can to survive the day)
If you can commit these to memory and apply them to brewing, you can 100% recreate an amazing coffee day after day.
So what are these core coffee concepts? They are in essence the 5M's of Italian Espresso:
Or in english:
Let's break these down one by one shall we?
You cannot brew crap coffee and expect it to taste good. You only get out what you put in. Choose a high quality, fresh roasted specialty coffee. If you're at the grocery store pay attention to: Roast Date, Roast Degree, and whether or not it's whole bean or ground.
You'll know it's specialty if they roaster respects the bean. This means, NOT dark roasted, NOT pre-ground, with a ROAST DATE on the bag. Why does all of this matter? I'll get into that in a later blog. But essentially, choose incredible coffee and you'll be able to brew an incredible cup.
The coffee grinder is the single most important purchase you'll make as a coffee lover. Buying a blade grinder for specialty coffee is like putting Wyagu in food processor. DON'T DO IT. The quality of the grinder affects the particle distribution size, which affects extraction, which affects flavor. Get a great grinder, and make sure you know how to use it.
To sum it up: know how to use your brew device so you can brew a better cup.
This one should be obvious, but just in case, if you take care of your brew gear, it will take care of you. Keep your coffee pot clean. Wash off your french press, clean out your Chemex. Keep your equipment clean and tidy and it'll last you for years down the line! All that coffee will build up if you don't regularly clean it out.
So as you can see its very easy to get into all the minutiae, the details behind each method, the techniques that make a great each brew method awesome. I hope that knowing these 5 necessities will put you on the right course in developing your skills for each brew methods. Chances are you've probably known or suspected a few of these points already, I hope having it all spelled out helps you put it all in perspective. There is so much more we can get into, but there are more blogs for that!
Thanks for reading, and have an incredible day!
- Erik Werner
Cold brew is quite a thing. If you've never enjoyed a cup of delicious cold brew extracted using Nitro, you're missing you. Get to your nearest coffee spot and get some ASAP. Sweet, balance, creamy, the perfect coffee.
What's incredible about cold brew is that it's so easy to make. Take some coffee grounds, add water, let it sit over night and voila, you've got cold brew.
Now we can get super technical, but we've found the best is a 10:1 ratio. So for every 1 gram of coffee you need 10 mL of water. Cold brew lasts in the fridge once you've filtered it out, so plan ahead, don't just make one cup, make many!
Here is a simple recipe for 1 gallon of cold brew. This will last you the whole week!
1 gallon = 128 fl. oz = 3785 ml /10 = 387 grams of coffee. So you'll need 387 grams of coffee. Grind it the same as a french press, add 1 gallon of cold water, and allow to steep 18 hours it the fridge. This recipe gives us success time after time.
Now what if you don't have a scale? Well you can work it in reverse.
340g. of coffee x 10 = 3400 ml of water = 115 fl. oz.
115 fl. oz is the same as 14 3/8 cups of water.
Maybe math isn't your strong suit. Take one 12oz bag of coffee, ground for french press, and add it to 1 gallon of water. This gives you 11.13:1 ratio, although less strong it's still delicious.
Use this brew ratio and make epic cold brew every time.
So you've decided to level up your coffee experience and you bought yourself a Chemex! Great! The Chemex Coffee Maker is one of many wonderful ways to brew excellent coffee at home.
First, a bit about the history. You can read it yourself here, but I'll paraphrase. The Chemex was created in 1941 by Dr. Peter Schlumbohm as a way to brew a better cup of coffee. Before this time, coffee was brewed like tea. Put a bunch of ground coffee in a jug or pot, and add hot water. Let it settle, and pour a cup. Also a product called Camp Coffee, a liquid essence was also popular. Instant coffee by Nestle had just hit the market, but didn't take off until almost a decade later. So you can image, the market was looking bleak and cups were bland.
Dr. Peter Schlumbohm, a chemist, began to explore a better to extract and filter coffee. Being familiar with lab equipment and design, be combined the designs of his laboratory glass funnel and Erlenmeyer flask, adding an air gap to the funnel design, and thus the chemex was born.
His product was highlighted at the MoMA as the best designed product in 1943 and over the next 20 years he continued to earn accolades and endorsements. In 1962, Dr. Peter Schlumbohn passed away, and chemex was given to it's Vice-President Marie Foley. Over the next years Chemex ownership would change, and product lines would be added, however ultimately, the core product, the 6-cup brewer, would retain its purpose and design. Chemex has been highlighted in various media, from Ian Fleming's James Bond, to sightings in the background of "Friends".
Today, you can still buy this brewer and enjoy, in my opinion, one of the most well rounded cups of coffee from any home brew system.
So how do you brew with this marvelous device? Simple:
First, pick your coffee. Given the way this device extracts flavors, I always recommend brewing with washed, light to medium roast coffees. I'll get into coffee selection in a later blog, but for now, just try me.
Pre-heat 800g (27 fl oz.) of water, to boiling. While that is heating, grind 50g of fresh roasted coffee on a medium - coarse setting. This should be roughly the size of grains of sea salt.
Now you're going to prepare your brewer. Pick your filter. You'll want to open one side of the folder paper filter and situate the thicker part (3-ply) over the air gap (the section of the funnel which looks like a spout). Note: If you are using natural brown paper, we highly recommend that you rinse the filter with hot so no fibers migrate into your brew. If you're using a white filter, pre-wet the filter so it stays in place. In both cases, discard any excess water before brewing.
Pour grounds into the center of filter and try to evenly disperse them to create an even flat bed at the top. (no mounds)
Now comes to the fun part. Place your brewer with grounds added on a scale. You'll want to brew in about 4 pours. We recommend the first pour be about 2.5x the mass of the grounds. So if you've got 50g of coffee, Pour 1 will be about 125g.
Notice the coffee will "bloom" during this first pour. What's happening here: You've got dry grounds are absorbing water, which is displacing any gasses trapped in the seed structure. This initial bloom creates a fair amount of turbulence in the slurry and is necessary to generate an even extraction. Allow it to bloom, for 30-45 seconds, and then pour your next set.
Now that the bloom is complete, you'll want to pour the remaining water in 3 sets. So if you've got 675g of water left, pour in 3 sets of 225 g. Try to maintain the same height, pour pattern, and timing. All in all you'll want to finish pouring your water by 3:30 total time.
Allow the coffee to extract, remove your filter, and give it a swirl and pour a cup.
Grab your favorite mug and enjoy a stellar cup of amazing coffee from the original Pour Over method of coffee brewers.
Happy Sipping,
Erik W.
It is reported that more than 65% of folks who brew coffee at home use a drip pot. The biggest market competition to drip pot manufacturing is Keurig. But the fact remains, drip pot brewers are a big part of American coffee culture. Below I'm going to attempt to explain
Disclaimer: If you've got a recipe that's working for you, stick with that and just consider this to be a helpful set of tips.
Okay, First let's look at your coffee pot. If you've got one of those glass carafe's you'll probably see some little marks with numbers 2 - 12. These are meant to indicate how many "cups" of coffee are in the pot. Keep in mind, these are not 8oz cups, these are whatever volume the manufacturer has determined what they consider to be a "cup" of coffee. In most cases this lands around 5 oz. 🤷🏻♂️
Now grab an electronic scale (if you don't have one, use a measuring cup and track the volume of water you add in) and fill your carafe with cold water up to the max fill line. Usually the 12 mark. Keep track of how much water you've added and remember how much is in a full pot. In most cases this seems to be about 60 fluid ounces (60 fl oz.) which converts to 1774 ml. (round to 1800ml ). Please note that with room temp water, 1 ml has a mass of one gram. So with our coffee calculation below, we can simply convert ml to grams.
I'm going to recommend brewing at a 16:1 ratio. So for every 16 parts water, use 1 part coffee. Simple math, 1800 g /16 = 112.5g of coffee. So this will constitute a Full Pot. Now, if you want to brew half a pot, then use half the amount of coffee. 3/4 of a pot, 3/4 of the amount of coffee. So on and so forth. Easy?
Okay, so why does it matter to use a scale instead of a scoop? In my blog on ratio I go into this in detail, but basically coffee seeds do not fill a scoop consistently, so using mass to calculate your brew ratio will be more accurate AND ultimately give you greater control of your coffee.
Some other fun tips:
If you are like me and you want to better manage your coffee intake, you can do some easy math and figure out how to extend your bag of coffee over the course of a week. So one 12 oz bag has 340 g of coffee. Divide that by 7 (for a brew a day) and you'll get ~ 48.5g. Now multiply that by 16 and you'll get 776g or 26 fl oz. This is enough to have two 13 oz cups of coffee a day, or one each for you and your partner (if you've got one, if not more for you!)
Alright folks, I hope that helps. I'm working on a video coming soon, but I just wanted to get this out there for you to brew with confidence!
Up Next: Chemex - Brew it right.
I don't know about you but the perfectionist in me is bothered by the simple knowledge that my coffee equipment is not sparkling clean. It's the knowledge that I COULD have a perfect cup if I wasn't getting the taste of a hundred other cups in with my perfectly brewed morning coffee.
Now, I could acknowledge the fact that I still have...
