How to Make the Perfect Cup of Coffee
There are countless ways to brew coffee, each method offering a unique experience in terms of taste, strength, and texture. Let’s take a closer look at some of the most popular brewing techniques:
The classic drip coffee maker is perhaps the most common method used in households. It’s simple, efficient, and produces a consistent cup of coffee. All you need to do is add ground coffee to a filter, pour water into the machine, and let it do the rest.
Now I’m going to be teaching you a quick recipe on how to make your favorite coffee at home with this drip coffee maker. So let’s begin. So what is a drip coffee maker? Drip coffee is a brewing method where hot water drips on to a bed of coffee grounds and then it filters down into the cup or a pot. First, I’m going to be demonstrating how you can actually use this drip coffee maker.
For this recipe, you will need your favorite coffee mug. I’m using medium roast coffee and about a cup of milk. The product comes with cup measurements on the pot which helps you add water with the right measurement in. So first, I’m going to pour the water into the container. Ideally, you should use water which is at room temperature and then the next step is to add the coffee powder in.
So depending on how dark and rich you want your coffee, you can add the powder in. I’m going to be using a 2 to 2 coffees with water ratio which will make about 2 cups of coffee. Now, I’ve added my coffee into the filter and you’ll see within 2 minutes the decoction will start dripping. As you can see here, the coffee is dropping steadily. I wish you could smell the aroma right now.
It’s delicious. I cannot wait. And the decoction is done. Now, for those of you who like the coffee black, this is where you stop your process. Just pour yourself a steaming hot cup of coffee.
A lot of people do not like their coffee bitter. What you can do is add your cup of milk to it. If you want sugar, you can add sugar as well or else this is where you stop your process. I hope you really liked
Pro Tip: Use freshly ground coffee beans and filtered water to elevate the quality of your drip coffee. Also, pay attention to the coffee-to-water ratio, as this will significantly impact the strength of your brew.
2. French Press
This is how to get incredible results with a French press. I am looking for a really delicious cup of coffee with none of the salty, sludgy stuff at the bottom. If you’re in a hurry, this really isn’t going to work for you. This is a really great way to make coffee, but it’s not very quick. You need a little bit of patience that will be rewarded.
You need to get some delicious coffee. Delicious means fresh, like freshly roasted, and you’re going to grind it fresh if you want the best possible experience. This will work with ground coffee, but it won’t taste as good as it could. So grind fresh. I would recommend starting between 60-70 grams per liter.
How you like it is up to you. Get some digital weighing scales. This is going to seem insane, but I promise you, it’s incredibly useful. There are two reasons to use it. You brew coffee that tastes really good.
You want to do that every single time you brew it, and therefore, knowing what you did is the way to get there. The alternative is that you brewed a bad cup of coffee. Now you know what you’re changing when you try something different the next time, and it will make life so much easier. Fresh, clean, soft water. Don’t brew with hard water.
Don’t brew with unfiltered water. If it doesn’t taste delicious on its own, it’s not going to make great tasting coffee. So here’s how this is going to work. You’re going to grind your coffee, put it in the French press. Ignore what most people say.
Don’t grind super coarse. Grind something more like you’d describe as medium. Boil your water. Don’t worry too much about this as long as it’s boiled. And then pour the right amount of water on top.
I might brew 30 grams of coffee to 500 grams of water. And then, we’re going to let it sit for 4 minutes. Just hang out. Wait. Be patient.
I am going to grab a couple of tablespoons. With one of them, I am going to stir the crust that forms on top of the coffee. A lot of it will start to fall away and you’ll be left with some bits on top, some foam, some floating bits. You want to scoop those off. Just throw them down the sink.
I want you to do nothing at all for at least 5 minutes. Now this is a little frustrating because you feel like you’ve brewed the coffee, but even if you poured it into a cup, it’s too hot to drink right now anyway. And the longer you leave it, the better it’s going to taste.
As you sit, all of those floating bits start to fall down to the bottom of the press and settle in that bed of coffee. This is exactly what I want. I don’t want those in the cup. We want those stuck down at the bottom of the cafeteria. After 5, maybe 7, 8 minutes, now you can drink it.
When you put the plunger in, do not plunge all the way. All you’re going to do there is stir up all the sediment all over again. So just till it’s sitting on the surface of the coffee. We can use it as a strainer in case there’s any big pieces that are still floating around, but we shouldn’t really need it. And then gently pour the coffee through into the cup.
This will be the most delicious silt sludge free cup of coffee you will get from a French press. Enjoy.
3. Pour-Over
I am going to go through a few simple steps to brewing a very tasty cup of coffee with a V60 brewer. I am going to start with a 1 to 16 brew ratio, which basically means about 20 grams of coffee to 320 grams of water, resulting in one tasty cup of coffee.
Alright, we’re going to get started with heating our water to boil. Go ahead and grab your filter, place it in the brewer, and I am going to just preheat and rinse the water filter to get all that papery paste out. As that continues to drip out, you’re going to get our coffee portions. Remember 20 grams. Go ahead and grind your coffee, pick a roughly medium to coarse grind size.
Now that I have my coffee ground, don’t forget to dump out that extra liquid. Don’t want that in your cup. Make sure it’s 20, go ahead and settle the bed a little bit, tear it again, and you’re ready to brew coffee. I’m going to start with the first phase of just pouring 50 grams of water and waiting for about 30 seconds. So basically what this does it allows all the gasses to escape resulting in a much tastier cup of coffee.
When it’s coming close to 30 seconds go ahead and prepare for your pulse. So you’re just going to pour up to the 200 gram on your scale
When it reaches 200, go ahead and give it a little swirl. Set it down and wait roughly 10 to 15 seconds for it to draw down. And now go ahead and pour to your total weight which is 320. Nice and easy circles.
Once you hit 320, go ahead and give it another swirl. So our target time is roughly 315 to drip out. If it happened a little faster, meaning it stopped at 3, then your grind size was a little too coarse, and you want to just tighten it up just a hair bit.
Now if it happened too long, like let’s say it went to 3:30, then your grind size was a little too fine. You want to coarsen it up a bit. So it’s finished brewing. I am going to take off this brewer, set it to the side, swirl it a little bit, and it’s ready to serve and enjoy.
It’s tasty. It was so tasty. So now you can basically evaluate your cup. If it tastes a little sour, then what happened was your grind size is probably a little too coarse. You want to make it a little finer to extract more.
If it tastes a little bitter and it’s drying out your mouth in the back, then it’s probably too fine and your time is probably too long, so you want to coarsen up that grind size. But for the most part, those are your simple adjustments to get a very tasty cup of coffee. Well, I hope you enjoyed that video and your cup of coffee. If you want to watch more videos, go ahead and hit the subscribe button. Stay tuned
4. Espresso Machine
You know that feeling whenever you walk into a coffee shop and you smell the aroma wafting through the air? Well, then congratulations, you know what love feels like. And I think that it’s time that we bring that love home, you know. Okay. So in order to make espresso, obviously, you need an espresso machine, but if you don’t have one then don’t worry.
It’s the first thing that I think about when I wake up. I use it as an excuse to meet up with old friends and that is exactly why I decided to team up with Trade Coffee. This is our first time together and they feel the same way that I do about properly sourced coffee. By having 50 of the nation’s best roasters with over 400 ethically sourced coffees to choose from. Being indecisive like myself, I pray for you, except they have a system that matches you with the perfect coffee for you.
So like I said, you’re going to need an espresso machine if you want to brew espresso. There are many on the market, but I’m using a Breville Barista Express. There’ll be a link in the description if you want to read about it and I’ll also have another link for a less expensive one.
I know that that one is a little bit pricey, but to me, this machine is the perfect beginner machine because it comes with everything you need in one package, and it brews pretty good espresso. And no, I’m not being paid by Breville, although I wish I was. Anyway, once you’ve got your machine, make sure that bad boy is topped off with water, make sure that your portal filter is fitted with the appropriate basket to pull a double shot, and let’s do this. Now, let’s quickly talk about types of beans. Some people don’t know this, but you can use any type of roast and origin you want for coffee choice.
It’s a misconception that it must be the darkest of the dark if you’re brewing espresso. I’ve actually found that some of my most favorite espresso pulls were actually with medium roasted beans. Roasting as well as origin is simply going to affect its flavor profile, so just play with some different roasts and see what you like the most. That’s kind of the fun of espresso making. This is also another reason why trade coffee could help you out.
Oh, and quick terminology lesson, when I say port filter, I’m talking about this. And when I say basket, I’m talking about this, which goes in the port filter. These are the things that you plug into the espresso machine. Next thing we’re going to talk about is I would really recommend weighing your coffee for your shots, especially when you’re first starting. I found that for this machine, about 17 to 18 grams of coffee for a double shot has worked pretty consistently for me.
You can zero out the weight of your port filter then grind the coffee and sort of just keep lying until it gets to that weight, or you can just weigh your beans and then grind all of that into your port filter. I prefer the latter simply because I don’t like to leave beans in the bean hopper as they tend to go stale pretty quickly and it’s not super airtight and the heat generated from the machine seems to leak into the hopper a little bit, which is no good. Next, we’re going to talk about grind consistency. This is one of the most important variables, period. This is one of the key deciders in whether your extraction is going to be great or very, very sad and depressing.
Too coarse and you’re going to get coffee that’s sour and acidic, and it doesn’t matter if you have a $5,000 La Marzocco. If your grind sucks, the coffee is going to suck. The first thing is making sure that you’ve got a good grinder. Grinders can get expensive, which is why I like using this 2 in one sort of setup that Breville has. The grinder on it isn’t the best in the world, but it’s surprisingly good.
And if you’re using this machine, I like to set my grind to a 4 or a 5 depending on the coffee I’m using for that day. You’re just going to kind of have to play with it. So next we’re going to talk about tamping. Get the weighted coffee in your portafilter group handle. If you wade your coffee, it’s probably piled pretty high.
Give it a few taps on the counter to get it a little leveled out. Now, the key point of tamping is that you want to make sure that your tamping is as level and even as possible in pressure and angle. You don’t want to tamp it at a diagonal slope. So take your tamper, holding it like you would a doorknob with your elbow pointing straight up in the air, and press down in one clean move. You don’t want to press too hard, but you also don’t want to press too soft.
There’s a lot of writing online about this. Someone in my DMs on Instagram described it to me as a warm hug with gravity. The main thing is once you’ve gotten the tamping level, then you simply need to just pay attention to consistent pressure every time you do it. You can also twist the tamper and sort of like polish the grounds. It’s not a necessity though.
But again, just keep testing and see what tamp pressure works the best for you. Okay. So we finally made it to the apex of Espresso, the extraction. Now make sure you’re pulling double shots with the weight that I’ve given you here, by the way. So every machine is going to pull its shot differently depending on how it’s set up to work.
Not to mention all of the previous things that we’ve been talking about are all going to affect the way the shot is pulled, especially the grind consistency and tamping. This particular machine pulls in volume rather than in seconds, so that kind of makes things a little different here. You’re going to take your portafilter filled with tamp down coffee; attach it to your group head. Now most people will suggest the timing of your shot to take about 25 to 30 seconds total. For me, it’s been relatively around 25 seconds including the 5 second pre infusion in the puck.
And if you have a pressure gauge, make sure that it’s hitting that espresso range on there. Now that timing is going to ebb and flow based on a lot of factors, but the number one thing here is your taste. If the coffee tastes good, not sour and salty or overly bitter, then you are in a great spot. But you gotta keep testing. There’s no way that I can just tell you and it’s going to work.
I would just say try and get it in that 25 to 30 second range and play with all these variables because that’s the whole point of this thing. Another good way to tell if you’re pulling a good shot is the crema. You’re noticing that stark separation between the sort of dark espresso and this sort of creamy top. That is because espresso is an emulsion just like mayo is with oil and egg yolks. That creamier part on top is called the crema and it is a result of that emulsification process.
Pro Tip: If you’re using an espresso machine at home, ensure your beans are finely ground and evenly tamped into the portafilter. The extraction time should be around 25-30 seconds for a well-balanced shot of espresso.
5. Cold Brew
Let’s just go ahead and face it. If you’re making cold brew at home from scratch, you’re addicted to coffee and maybe, well, probably just caffeine as a whole. But that’s okay. Let me be of assistance. Why cold brew?
Right? Why? Cold brew versus iced coffee. Cold brew extracts the coffee very slowly over a long period of time which limits the amount of acidity and bitterness that is already involved in coffee making. Because with the heat in coffee, that tends to extract a little bit of bitterness and much more acidic whereas with cold brew, you get a lower acidity, lower bitterness and an overall smoother flavor and more importantly, a higher Wow.
That was a lot of saliva. My mouth is obviously getting excited for cold brew. Plus, not to mention much higher caffeine content. So, you’re welcome. Now, with good cold brew come good beans.
Obviously, that’s kind of a given, but you know, use your favorite or ideally use a locally sourced, maybe, freshly roasted coffee. Some sites say that older coffee is better, but you know, that is up to you. Now, we’re going to be doing 2 different methods here, but they both use the same grind consistency in the same ratio of coffee to water. Now, we’re going to start by grinding 1 and a half cups or 80 grams of coffee beans. Now, when you’re grinding the coffee, keep in mind that you want the grind consistency to be relatively coarse, something like coarse cornmeal.
Then simply add that coffee to a half gallon container. In this case, I used a half gallon mason jar. They’re really great and they’re cheap. Now, for method number 1, which is the immersion cold brew method. So to these beans, you’re going to add 6 cups or 1400 grams of cold or room temperature water, either or, you just don’t want it to be hot.
Ideally, Give it a good stir to make sure that you’ve hydrated all the grounds, put a lid on it, and place it in the fridge for 12 to 24 hours. 24 hours will make a much stronger brew, and 12 hours will make a pretty light brew. Now, for method number 2, which is the hot blue method. This is essentially the same thing, but this time you’re only going to add a third of your water which has been heated up until it’s steamy and hot, not quite boiling, but pretty hot. And if you want to be specific, probably somewhere around 205 degrees Fahrenheit.
Get that a little stir to hydrate the beans and let it sit for 1 minute, no more no less. Then immediately after that minute, add the remaining 4 cups of your water and make sure that that water is cold because you want to cool this mixture right back down. Yet again, give it a little stir, put a lid on it, place it in the fridge for 12 to 24 hours. Now, once that 12 to 24 hours is up, remove it from the fridge, and now we have to strain it. Now, since I’m giving you 2 different methods to brew the cold brew, it only seems right to give you 2 different methods to strain it.
Now, the first one would be through a fine mesh strainer with cheesecloth laid over it. The downside and drawback of this method is that if you strain it through this and your grinder doesn’t get a super consistent grind, then it’s going to be a little bit gritty. You’re going to get a little bit of grittiness through there, so, you know, this may not be a good choice for everybody. Now the other method that I’ve sort of figured out is pouring it through a pour over type coffee situation. So I’m basically just pouring it through the filter of my pour over, AKA my Chemex, and this actually filters out all the grounds.
You get a super smooth, no gritty, literally zero grittiness no matter how inconsistent your grinder is. Takes a bit longer, but hey, it works. Now, you can also get this thing called a coffee sock. It basically brews it and strains it for you. I’ll put a link to the description if you want to get it.
Hit me up in the comments if you have any questions. If I butchered any facts, I’m sure somebody down there will let me know. And I look forward to learning from you as well. A lot of times, like, y’all bring up things in the comments that I didn’t realize. So I appreciate any feedback that you give me that may correct anything that I may have said wrong.
