Coffee leads men to trifle away their time, scald their chops, and spend their money, all for a little base, black, thick, nasty, bitter, stinking nauseous puddle water.
The Women's Petition Against Coffee, 1674

October 21, 2022

Coffee Brewing Methods

Is there a best method for brewing coffee? I don't know and part of my view of the world is that I don't care. There are many different methods, all good, and yielding different results. What you should do is to experiment and find what suits you. There are many variables to balance. Cost, speed, convenience, and quality are just starters. Do you want to make a big batch quickly, or do you want to take your time making a single cup?

Espresso

I am putting this up front to sort of get it out of the way for now. I have an espresso machine, but rarely use it. I recognize this is a "rabbit hole" of its own, but I think it deserves separate treatment from other viewing methods. If you go down the espresso road you will want to spend more money on a grinder and get one that will make the fine grind espresso requires.

Brew methods

Here is a quick list, and no doubt others could be added. Note that I am bypassing the evil Keurig machines, but I wanted to use a sentence at least to insult them and the trash they produce.

Check this out, a whole page (a whole site!) devoted to the various methods for brewing coffee:

Many many serious coffee drinkers are into espresso machines. I have not taken this plunge, and am still happily using my french press. (Even though my family bought me an espresso machine several years ago, which my younger son has gladly adopted).

It has been said that a good grinder can do as much to make (or wreck) a great cup of coffee as anything else. I have long been using a Braun blade grinder, and have been surprised to learn that these are generally despised by coffee freaks. Well, I have a lot to learn.

It pretty much boils down to this. You need to grind uniformly sized coffee to have any control over the process. Finer coffee requires shorter extraction times. Too long of an extraction time yields bitterness. With a mix of coarse and fine coffee you cannot pick a time suited to either. If you do what most people would, you pick a time suited for the coarser material, and then get bitter stuff from the fines.

I have been using finer that recommended coffee, ground in a blade grinder, and putting up with sludge and bitterness -- perhaps all this will change.

Aeropress

I am still brewing with my french press, but look at this gadget with interest: You get one of these for $40. You also need a supply of little round paper filters. Alternately you can buy a metal filter (an extra $15) and bypass the paper altogether.

How much coffee

There are a number of variables you can fiddle with when making coffee: This section deals with the last variable, namely how much coffee to use for a given quantity of water.

At this time I am making coffee in a french press. My press holds 4 cups (32 ounces) of water -- about a liter. This size press is sometimes referred to as an 8T press, where T stands for "Tasse" (german for cup). A mighty small cup. Some people discuss using some measure like 2 tablespoons per cup, usually referring to a 6 ounce cup. The moral of this story is that the unit "cup" is ambiguous and almost meaningless when talking about coffee brewing.

The more intelligent people will talk about weights, of both coffee and water. I am all for weighing coffee (measuring the volume of coffee, either as whole beans or ground coffee is imprecise and variable). Measurements like a "heaping tablespoon" are much too crude and subject to individual interpretation. So lets weigh our coffee. I can't quite bring myself to weigh my water. I figure that 1 milliliter of water is almost exactly 1 gram. So my press (which holds 1 liter) will hold 1000 grams of water. But lets talk about 500 grams (half a liter, or my press half filled).

A general recommendation is a 16:1 water to coffee ratio, where water is measured in grams (or milliliters) and coffee in grams. Another ratio you will hear is 17.2:1, which would be 58 grams for a liter. Other sources recommend 68 grams. Another source recommends from 52 to 64 grams per liter. More and more I am hearing the 60 gram number (but also 55).

There certainly seems to be a concensus in this range, and the sensible thing to do is to experiment with the exact amount.

For a long time I have used 30 grams for my 1 liter french press with a 3 minute brew time (my burr grinder doesn't grind as coarse as would be ideal for a french press, so I compensate with a shorter brew time.) I bumped the amount of coffee up to 47 grams and was definitely pleased.

Note that I receive 2 pounds of coffee every month. This is 900 grams of coffee. So given 30 days in a month, this allows me to use 30 grams per day.

The following article discusses both the coffee to water ratio and the brew time, but doesn't say much about coarseness of grind.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's coffee pages / tom@mmto.org