Quality Coffee

Some times when some one comes back to your house for coffee, they actually expect to drink coffee at some stage.

Here is a guide to making quality coffee with a cafetiere (coffee plunger).

Remember, coffee boiled is coffee spoiled, so pour the boiling water into the cup first to take some heat out of it.

If you want to avoid washing up a spoon, then put a little coffee in the cup first (to stop cold milk from cooling or cracking the cup), then the milk then the rest of the coffee.

THE FUNDAMENTALS:

My original guitar teacher decided to forsake a career as a spectacular guitarist for one as a food scientist. My guitar playing never recovered, but he went on to become quite successful in his new arena. In fact he received “special thanks” in a recent book by a famous chef who would be well known for a scientific approach to cooking.

 A few weeks ago I was visiting him and helping him connect to his rocking past, but instead of getting the Stratocaster out of the case and turning his Marshall amps up to 11, he wanted to show me his new coffee-making equipment.

Very grown up, but also very engaging.

The science involved in pursuing the ideal cup of coffee is fascinating, and pretty soon I descended upon his reference library to find out more on the theory and practice of making great coffee. Initially, I thought that because a machine is producing this, the quality of the coffee would be consistent as long as the ingredients were standardised. He soon put me right. Even with a machine as elaborate as his (which is worth considerably more than my last three cars combined), there is still a decisive amount of human influence in the end result.

This manifests itself in many ways:

1. Selecting the coffee
2. Storing and preparing the coffee for brewing
3. Brewing technique
4. Serving method

Firstly is the choice of the coffee. One approach you can start to ensure a better cup of coffee is to:

1. Buy your coffee as roasted whole coffee beans
2. Buy them as soon after roasting as possible
3. Buy small amounts frequently – don’t store them
   for too long
4. Store the whole beans carefully
5. Grind the beans yourself immediately before
   brewing

This is a better bet than buying coffee pre-ground if you want a more complete experience of coffee flavours and aromas. It is certainly more satisfying than using instant coffee.

Choosing coffee is not just about choosing the state you buy it in, but also the choice of bean – and certain varieties of coffee are more suited to certain methods of brewing. As a big advocate of the French Press/ Cafetière method of providing a great cup of coffee for minimum expense and effort, I learnt that this method tends to extract the elements that make coffee taste acidic, and so it works best for coffees that yield less of these elements.

The French Press/cafetière also delivers a finished result that emphasises “body” over aroma and the subtle nuances of certain varieties of bean, so when brewing with this method look out for coffee beans that are Medium-Roasted and flavourful. It also delivers relatively well received results for coffees that have been decaffeinated. Some varieties of bean that have a general consensus as delivering superior coffee when brewing with the French Press/Cafetière are:

1. Indonesian – look for coffee from Sumatra and
   Sulawesi
2. Latin American
3. East African – look for Ethiopian Harrar
4. Middle Eastern – look for Yemeni Mocha
5. Decaffeinated varieties

Caring and Preparing for Coffee Beans Before You Buy Them

When you have selected the beans, you need to take care of them. Most coffee is stale by the time you lift it off the shelf. In fact, if roast beans are exposed to air they will be at their best for about one week, and will have started to deteriorate in week 2. Expect them to have lost much of their appeal by week 6.

Air causes coffee to oxidise, so the logical thing would be to store it in an airtight container. The problem with this is that freshly roasted coffee will release gas, particularly carbon dioxide (CO₂) and in relatively large quantity (the beans produce about three time their own volume in gas). If they were packed in a totally airtight container it would explode.

One large scale way to deal with this is for the manufacturer to allow the beans to release this gas, and then pack them in an airtight container. Usually if you buy coffee in a totally airtight container, it has been ground and de-gassed before packaging (and it has gone a long way down the road to becoming stale).

In the 1960s, airtight packages with one way valves became a viable way of storing coffee, and it could even be packaged in an inert gas atmosphere or a vacuum to reduce the staling process even further. These bags can keep coffee fresh for up to three months.

My coffee mentor stresses the importance of buying your coffee as soon as possible after roasting to get the maximum benefit out of it for the longest time. In fact, any coffee he buys will have the roasting date stamped on it.

I set about finding some recently roasted coffee in my local shops and it wasn’t an easy task. Most bags of coffee contain pre-ground coffee for a start, not the whole beans. Those that had the whole beans didn’t usually state when the roasting was done.

Those that did have a declared roasting date seemed to have been sitting on the shelf (or in a ware house or a truck) for many months before I lifted them to check, and they carried optimistic “Best Before” dates that were a full year after their roast date (which in one case was 10 months ago, so they only had 8 weeks left at their “best”).

My coffee guru circumvents all this frustration by online orders and mail delivery. He reads the description of particular beans or blends on the website of his retailer, then decides what he is interested in and then checks when it is due for roasting, and puts in an order. A courier dropped off his most recent adventure into the world of coffee a few days before I visited. This may seem excessive, but it is only a fraction of the fuss that some people make over wine and it all adds to the sense of occasion and the idea that food and drink, especially when shared with company, is special.

When ordering roast coffee beans online, look for a company with these characteristics:

1. They are close enough to you for the beans to
   arrive with you quickly by post
2. They have a good knowledge of their beans –
   types, crops, source origin etc
3. They should be conducting their own roasting
4. They should roast frequently, and in relatively
   small quantities.
5. They may even roast particular beans on specific
   days and the website will tell you this
6. They should be dispatching the coffee soon after
   roasting,
7. Coffee should be in one of those sealed containers
   with the one way valve.

Ideally the roasting is happening near you, or at least within a day or two’s post of you, not near where the coffee was grown, or some intermediary country along the way.

If you are really serious about it, you can take into account the day of the week that they roast on, and when that consignment can make the post – since post at the start of the week gets delivered before the weekend, whereas post on a Friday gets slowed up by the weekend. My friend usually orders on a Monday for a roasting on a Tuesday, so that he gets a delivery on the Thursday. He avoids the Thursday roasting, because it won’t be delivered on Sunday, or possibly even the following Monday.

But the internet doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the shop retailer – sometimes it helps him, and saves you the cost of postage and couriers. Two weeks ago, I came across a bag of coffee that was recently (two months ago) roasted within 30kms of my house. I checked out the company online, where they had a list of local retailers stocking their freshly roasted beans, and found one near me. I bought a bag of beans that were roasted only 10 days before, and my own coffee adventure had begun!

Caring and Preparing for Coffee Beans After You Buy Them

When you get your beans home, store them carefully. Keep them in an airtight (that is, airtight except for the one way valve) container, preferably not regular plastic. Store them as whole beans, don’t grind them until you want to drink the coffee. In fact, they will keep fresher for longer if you keep them in the freezer. Avoid a plastic-smelling container or close proximity to other strong flavours and odours – the coffee can absorb them, even in the freezer. The fridge isn’t really cold enough to make a significant extension to the coffee’s storage life, and is likely to have even more conflicting smells than the freezer.

When you are ready to grind the beans, you can use them directly from the freezer, they don’t need to be thawed. In fact, unless you are careful, thawing usually involves thawing more than you are planning to use, and then re-freezing the surplus. Repeated thawing and re-freezing results in the beans getting damp with condensation of moisture in the air, which can cause them to deteriorate faster than if they had stayed dry.

So, just use the beans you need and put the rest back in the freezer straight away. In fact, my coffee studying friend even suggests measuring out individual “doses” of coffee so that you can remove just enough for each cup from the freezer while leaving the rest of your stash undisturbed. We looked at each other and agreed that although this was probably the best policy, in practice it would be a little too much work and make you look a little obsessive. Which might not be too endearing to anyone you were trying to
impress with your coffee making skills.

The next step in the coffee making process is the grinding. As soon as coffee is ground, its surface area is increased enormously. This allows much more rapid oxidation and a much accelerated path to going stale. Ground coffee can go stale in a matter of hours. Espresso coffee, with its ultra-fine grind can be stale in an hour. So, for best results, grinding needs to be done immediately before brewing.

Most people buy their coffee pre-ground, or even as instant coffee, and apart from the subtleties of the drink, they are also trading convenience for this vital part of the coffee ritual.

Just as different types of bean are best served by different types of brewing, different types of brewing are best served by different types of grinding — the finer the grind, the shorter the brew time. When you buy a pack of coffee in the supermarket and it says “suitable for all types of coffee making machine”, you are probably not getting the best grind for any particular machine, but just the best compromise for them all. And since it is pre-ground, it may well be oxidised by then too.

 Grinding for brewing:

1  Espresso

For most methods of brewing a simple grinder will do the trick, but for espresso you need to be cautious, as Espresso has a very short brew time (25 seconds) and requires an ultra-fine grind. The obvious thing to do to achieve an ultra-fine grind would just be to grind the beans for longer. This can become counterproductive as the sheer friction from the grinder blades
(not to mention the motor) will heat up and spoil the coffee before the water
gets near it. So if you really intend drinking a lot of your coffee as Espresso, you may want to consider getting a grinder especially for the task which delivers the fine, almost dusty, grind of Espresso coffee in a few seconds with minimal overheating. Otherwise, a good 25-30 seconds of more might be needed in a conventional grinder.

2   Conefilter/Vacuum Brewing

This requires a fine grind, not as fine as Espresso, but fine enough to allow a good brew in a short time (less than four minutes), which would take about 20-25 seconds in an everyday grinder.

3  Drip Brewer

More coarse than the Conefilter/Vacuum brew, about 15 seconds in the grinder would be enough, but it will still be a less coarse grind than the French Press/cafetière.

4  French Press/cafetière

This brewing method benefits from a coarser grind, and 10 seconds in a normal grinder should do the trick.

After you have cared for the beans, and ground them the right way for the coffee you are about to drink, then brewing is next!

 Brewing Great Coffee

Regardless of the method of brewing, one resounding phrase is applied to making coffee: “coffee boiled is coffee spoiled.” Most people drinking instant coffee just pour the water from a kettle into a cup with the coffee powder at the bottom, and they may well argue that the temperature of the water won’t make a great deal of difference to the taste of their drink.

True, and well it might not. Similarly, listening to music from an MP3 player on a plane may not sound significantly different through expensive headphones, but it isn’t necessarily the best material or environment to make comparisons with.

Coffee enthusiasts who go to the trouble of selecting their beans, storing them carefully and grinding at home will want the best chance of getting the widest range of flavours and aromas from their coffee, and so will take their brewing seriously. Coffee made with boiling water will lose the more volatile components within it, and may extract some of the less pleasant tasting ones too.

The good bits and the bad bits:

Although it is possible to extract about 30% (about a third) by weight of ground coffee beans while brewing, there would be a general opinion that only about 20% (one fifth) of this is pleasant tasting, while the remaining 10% (one tenth) is bitter and unpleasant to taste. In other words, if the brewing goes wrong, there can be almost half as much unpleasant tasting elements in the coffee as pleasant ones. So it is important not to over extract
everything that is soluble in the bean.

Extraction of any of the soluble elements of the coffee depends on various physical factors:

1 Temperature – the hotter the water, the more extracted from the coffee

2 Volume- the more water, the more extracted from the coffee

3 Surface area of the coffee – the more area (the finer the grind) the more extracted from the coffee.

4 Time - the longer the coffee is exposed to the water, the more is extracted from it

Temperature

So avoid using too fine a grind, too much water, and water that is too hot. The water should be 90C-95C (195F-205F).

How Much Coffee to How Much Water?

The ideal proportion of coffee should be about 50g-70g of ground coffee per litre (or a quarter pound per “pot” in the US). Since most people don’t easily have the means to accurately measure small weights like 50g, it can be easier to measure small volumes – for coffee that would be 2 heaped tablespoons for 6 ounces of brewing water.

If you like a milder cup, resist the urge to add more water or less coffee at the brewing stage – make the coffee using these proportions and then dilute it, otherwise you run the risk of over extracting the unpleasant tasting compounds within the coffee.

Brewing times

Brewing times are related to the type of brewing, and that should have a close relation to the fineness or coarseness of the grind.
Espresso: 20-25 seconds (although the water is
blasted through the coffee at high pressure)
Cone Filter/Vacuum: 1-4 minutes
Drip Brewing: 4-6 minutes (watch this one, it
often gets over brewed)
French Press/cafetière: 4-6 minutes

When you brew coffee, drink it fresh. It can still oxidise and degrade in the cup. You should make individual cups as you want to drink it – but if you can’t and you want to make a larger volume up to drink over a period of time, you are better keeping it warm by not letting it go cold in the first place, so pour it into a thermos flask. If you try to keep it warm by reheating already brewed coffee, you can expect it to be as good for a small fraction of the time.

Have fun!

Next page – impressing a beautiful woman with your cooking starts well ahead of switching on the oven.