Stop Drinking Trash Coffee
Categories:
[How To]
Tags:
[coffee]
Coffee is one of the most consumed drinks it the entire world. However many people don't know how to make a great cup of joe. There are a few quick ways to push your morning drink to the next level without much hassle.
1. Grind
The first step everyone should start out with is grinding their coffee as they need. Stop buying pre-ground coffee because once the bean is ground into a powder, it goes stale very fast. There are decent grinds online for under fifty USD. The first one my wife an I had was the Cuisinart DBM-8 Supreme Grind Automatic Burr Mill.
How you choose to brew the coffee after grinding is much less important than getting the grind correct. For drip coffee, you want a grind that is mid-way between fine and coarse. While for a french press style brew we want to have our grind be coarse. If you're going to use a Keurig to brew your coffee use a coarse grind like we would with the French Press.
Currently, I use the [Breville The Dose Control Pro][]. It's sitting at 180 USD on Amazon but is often on eBay for a little less. The reason we have this more expensive grinder is because we use an espresso machine for all our coffee needs. Having a grinder that can produce consistently sized particles is a must of espresso drinks.
For photos showing what each type of grind looks like check out ineedcoffee.com grind chart.
2. Filter The Water
The coffee will have a better taste if you filter your water before use. Many people already do this, but just in case you don't you know to start. There does need to be some minerals it the water to help extract the coffee so using distilled water is often not recommended.
What I do is mix filtered water from the fridge dispenser with the water from my ZeroWater pitcher. The reason I mix is because the ZeroWater takes out (almost) everything and leaves us with distilled-like water. I don't only use the fridge filtered water because it still has way more of the unhealthy stuff (like particles of peed out medicine). Mixing it lowers the parts per million of the regular filtered water and allows just enough to extract a good level of flavor.
Yeah, that's a bit extreme. I have made tea and coffee with 100% ZeroWater filtered water, and it tastes just fine. The only thing I can say I noticed is that the coffee is a bit "flat" for whatever that is worth.
3. Buy Fresh!
Even if you never do this step, you will still be way ahead of most. However, if you want to squeeze out even more flavor and take your coffee up yet another level then buying freshly roasted coffee is a must. Coffee is best when ground and consumed within two weeks of roasting. For some reason, coffee loves to go stale quick so never buy more than you will drink over two weeks.
For me, that is about a half pound of coffee beans ever ten to fourteen days. I don't drink coffee at home during the week since I am able to make great coffee here at work (plus they pay for it!) My wife does drink an Americano every day, and when I am home, I'll have one or two double shots of espresso in the morning. We will probably go through our current coffee stash much faster over the next two weeks since I'll be home thanks to the holidays and extra days off.
If you are an email kind of nerd you can sign up for mine here. You can always replay to any of my emails to start a conversation or ask me a question. You can donate to this site from my Liberapay account if you so choose.