A few tips on improving your coffee game
"I'm a weird coffee person"
— James Hoffmann
Being English, the first thing my father taught me to do in the kitchen was how to make a decent cup of tea. I learned early in life to make reallygood tea. The same could not be said for my coffee skills. Although my parents owned a percolator it was rarely used and I was never taught how to operate it. So when I left home I was left to fend for myself and knew no better than instant coffee. Stick a spoonful in a mug, add really hot water, sugar and milk, job done. It was easy but it was awful. Then I went to Europe and discovered really good coffee both in Hungary and Italy. It taught me a lesson about the value of understanding coffee and since then I learned about different mechanisms to deliver a good cup from those little brown beans. Having discovered this I began to both enjoy and make good coffee at home. Now I'm fussier about my coffee than I am about tea.
Refining your technique and possibly becoming a weird coffee person.
To really get the best out of coffee, it's important to understand a little about different coffees, how each method of making coffee works, and to expand your horizons a little. However you make your brew, I'm going to recommend several things.
Firstly, read The Four M's of Good Coffee, secondly, (and I can't stress this enough), get a good grinder and buy freshly-roasted whole beans. Thirdly, buy a coffee scale. These are available from about $15, and often include a timer to help you refine your technique (important for a pourover). The one I currently use is pretty basic, but it allows me to measure up to 500 grams in increments of 0.1 grams so I can measure out beans and water with confidence. The main advantage here is that it will enable you to replicate a recipe and thus create a consistent quality, but it will also allow you to experiment more.
This leads me to the last item, which is the cheapest recommendation of all; buy a notebook to record your experiments. A notebook can be had with pocket change and it's a great investment if you're going to start to really learn about coffee. You can build up a log of the beans you've tried, and record grind sizes, amounts and methods. For each change, take notes on the flavour; was it bitter or sour? Strong, weak? What other flavours did you discern, was it floral, fruit, citrus, cocoa? What did you like or dislike? It's a game-changer, even at the basic level of "messing with things to see what happens". Success or failure of a particular brew can help you improve both understanding and technique next time.
Learn to enjoy black coffee first. This really is crucial unless you're willing to be a Starbucks drink addict for the rest of your life. Once you understand coffee at this level and learn to discern flavour profiles, you can start adding milk and sugar and whatnot to the recipe. It's a great way to get a deeper understanding of the drink, and vital if you're ever to attend a coffee tasting, or "cupping".
The Coffee
The writeup above covers a lot about coffee itself, and I've not much to add, excepting this (I can't stress this enough): the best improvement you can make to coffee at home is to buy a grinder and get freshly roasted whole beans and grind them just before use. The next best improvement is to find a local roastery or if you're in a roaster desert, check out local cafés, grocery stores or get on the internet to find your beans.
Coffee preference varies wildly, and it's not just about roast levels. You will learn that the taste of coffee can vary enormously depending on different factors such as country of origin, the varietal and even the altitude it was grown at. I tend to prefer South Americans as I prefer the more chocolately flavours and lower acidity over the citrus and floral. I'm not about to list the country profiles, but if you're interested, there's a good chart highlighting the major differences here. Altitude affects the caffeine content, surprisingly enough. High-altitude coffees tend to have smaller beans and lower caffeine.
How it's processed also has an effect. I'm not going into a huge amount of detail right now (it deserves a writeup of its own), but in brief, there are three major ways that beans are processed after picking. The bean when picked is known as a cherry, as it's encased in a fleshy fruit that needs to be removed. The dry (or natural) process is the oldest, traditional way, simply spreading the cherries out in the sun and turning them to dry the husk, which is then removed. The flavour profiles can vary wildly, but are often sweeter and fruitier, often being described as being like red wines. The washed process takes the opposite approach. Here the fruit body is removed by agitating the cherries in water and then allowing them to ferment before removing the flesh and drying the beans. This tends to produce more complex and acidic flavour profiles, more like white wine than red. Then there is the honey process, which disappointingly does not use honey. The coffee is mostly defleshed mechanically before drying, a little of the fruit body still clinging to the bean. The natural fermentation allows for more sugars from the pulp to migrate into the bean, hence the name suggesting the sweetness.
There's been a lot of controversy over decaffeinated coffee. There is a Death Before Decaf school of thought that I belonged to for years, before discovering a local roaster whose decaf ranks amongst the best coffees I've ever had. Consequently I drink more of it, and not just in the afternoons and evenings, often making myself a quick shot mid-morning just for the sheer joy of having one, rather than needing to get moar caffeine. Decaffeination methods have become more refined and roasters are producing some excellent blends that are a sheer delight to drink.
Be willing to experiment. Get samples, learn to do tastings at home. Coffees are tasted by cupping; this involves adding almost-boiling after to a bowl of ground coffee, allowing it to infuse, and it's tasted after removing the floating grounds. I admit that I don't do this enough. (Note to Self: rewatch James Hoffmann's Guide to Cupping.)
The coffee scene has changed a lot in the twenty-five years I've been getting serious about coffee, and there's much more choice and information about different beans. The "third-wave coffee" specialty movement has enabled more people to learn and appreciate the difference between country of origin, varietals and processing methods, all of which make a difference to the end result. That said, there is no need to go down that rabbit hole all at once. Talk to the staff at your favourite café, find a coffee roasted to your preference, and grind it yourself. Be prepared to make mistakes, keep a record of what you're doing, what works and what doesn't.
A quick word about storage; keep your coffee sealed in a dark place. I tend to have two bags open at a time, but I tightly seal them in their bags and expel the air. They'll be good for a month. If you're needing to store a lot of roasted beans, freeze them a week's worth at a time. If you need to keep a few ready to use, consider investing in some vacuum jars.
I'm planning to write about brewing methods and home roasting later on. Now, having talked about equipment, and the importance of grinding your beans just before use, I've a quick look at what's available.
The Grind and The Grinder
Each method of making coffee requires different grind sizes (fine for espresso, medium for pourover and slightly coarser for [French press). This is the second thing to learn about coffee; to get the best results you have to allow for the different amount of time the grounds are in contact with the water. Too much time for the grind size leads to over-extraction which can cause bitterness. A sour flavour can be the result of under-extraction. There are other variables at work, one of which is water temperature, but grinding too finely or coarsely can produce an unpleasant taste.
So you will need a grinder. There are three basic types, blade and burr machines. For burr grinders you have the further choice of manual or electric.
Electric blade grinders are the kind of thing you'll find at the bottom end. They have a small capacity and sharpish spinning blades. The beans go in, you hit a button and the beans are chopped ever finer. The upside is the cheapness of this approach, they can be found in most household or big-box stores for around $15¹. If you stop using them for coffee, hey presto now you have a spice grinder. The biggest downside is that the grind size is highly variable and difficult to control. Having used one of these, the method that produced the best results was to use what I think of as the "pulse and shake". Beans in, hold the button for a couple of seconds, shake the contents and repeat until the grind looks good. You'll need to experiment a lot. Take notes, I can't stress this enough!
Burr grinders are the step up from this. These use disks or cones with grooves that cut the coffee beans progressively finer. The grind size is adjustable by changing the distance between the two cutting surfaces. Cheaper grinders have ceramic burrs, the better quality tend to be machined from steel billets. Here your choice is between a hand grinder or a powered machine. Naturally, the hand grinder is less expensive as it consists of fewer parts. Hand grinding does have advantages other than cost. It's quieter than an electric (this can be important in the fragile time that is morning!) but obviously requires that you're willing to spend a minute or so turning a handle. Paying more gets better build quality, higher grade steel or titanium burr sets and better bearings. The grind size tends to get more consistent with better and more predictable flavour.
Electric grinders do have the advantage of less effort, and you can be doing other things while the beans are being ground. Additionally, if you're making a lot of coffee, grinding by hand can be a chore. Penny for penny you're generally going to get better results from a hand grinder, but those are really best for one or two cups at a time. The cost of both types is highly variable; for hand grinders, you can spend anything from about $15 up to hundreds, but the results will always be better than a blade machine. Electric burr grinders can be had for as little as $50, but can reach into the hundreds.
So what do I use? I quickly rejected blade grinders as they produced poor results in the finished cup. I moved up to a an electric burr grinder, then to a mid-range Hario with ceramic burrs and had decent results, and after a year with that bought a Timemore C2 which I've been using for over two years. In the future I may upgrade, possibly to a better design of titanium burrs. But for now, I'm happy with the fairly consistent grind size.
There is so much more to be written about coffee, I'm certainly planning to write about storage, brewing methods and possibly write up some of my tasting notes. Meanwhile I will continue to love my Moka pot, which I use as my daily driver to make a faux cappuccino, or a single espresso-style shot just for the enjoyment of it. Meanwhile, I've had my early-morning coffee, just had a wonderful espresso in a local café and I'm ready to face the day.
¹ I'm going to use US dollars for pricing. Apologies, but I'm doing price research using Amazon for the most part.
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