How to Brew - The Coffee101 Beginners' Guide to
Brewing Great Coffee at Home
Brewing Great Coffee
Spoiler: It's all about grinding your beans and tasting the coffee​​​​
Coffee making is actually very simple. You combine coffee with water, and then ideally, separate the liquid from the solids so you don’t end up drinking gritty bits. Everything else is detail, even though those details can quickly become quite complicated. How complicated depends on what kind of coffee you want to make and how good you want it to be.
Usually, coffee making is explained as a specific method and described with recipes and instructions. However, because there are fundamentals that apply to whatever brewing method you choose, Coffee101 recommends acquiring the basics before focusing on the details of specific brewing methods.​
Crucial Insight: The way to consistently make great coffee is to keep refining what you've made; improving what you're brewing, until you get to the best possible cup of coffee your beans can make. Tasting is the key to refining.
To refine your coffee brewing, brew your coffee for the first time, taste what you've brewed, and then each time you brew it again, adjust it as needed until it can't be improved any further and you've brewed the best cup of coffee the beans can provide. (At which point you've then got to decide whether to stick or twist!? Are you happy to stay with what you're brewing, or do you try different beans?)
To be able to refine what you've made, you need to recognise what needs to be changed and have the know-how to make the necessary changes. Coffee101 is here to help you diagnose what needs to change and to share what's required to refine your coffee brewing.​
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Because you can't fix a problem until you know what the problem is, refining all begins with truly tasting your coffee. Coffee101 maintains that the key skill to acquire and develop is the ability to recognise what you're tasting. If you don't much like what you've brewed, recognising why is critical. With a bit of Coffee101 knowledge, you can understand why and what to do to make the changes required to improve your brew. Tasting and refining are skills worth pursuing: they are the keys to making great coffee, no matter which brewing method you choose.
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If your coffee isn't as good as it could be and is, for example, sour, you need to be able to diagnose the problem. Regardless of whether you used a cafetière, a V60, an Aeropress, a Clever Dripper, or an espresso machine, if coffee is too sour, the problem is the same: The beans have been overextracted. If you can recognise sourness, you can change what you are doing to correct the overextraction. How you specifically do that partly depends on the brewing method, but in each case, you're doing the same thing: taking steps to correct and refine your brewing, something which requires 4 key skills common to all the brewing methods.
The Coffee101 Four Essential Brewing Skills.
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Coffee101 Skill 1 - Tasting Coffee:
Effectively tasting your coffee to identify what can be refined is a critical and often overlooked skill, especially when beginning to brew your own home coffee.​
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Crucial Insight: Great beans, badly brewed, can still make an awful cup of coffee. Too often, coffee beans get blamed for a bad cup of coffee when, instead, effectively tasting the coffee can often show how to fix it.
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Coffee101 Skill 2 - Coffee Grinding
Grinding your own coffee is essential for two reasons:
1) Ground coffee goes stale much faster than whole beans. Because grinding vastly increases the surface area exposed to air, ground coffee fades, and starts to go stale so quickly that even the best storage can’t keep it fresh for long.
2) Grinding your own coffee gives you control over the grind size, which allows you to adjust and manipulate coffee extraction to get the best results from whatever brewing method you use. Being able to set the grind size lets you taste your coffee and then adjust it to refine the coffee extraction and brew the best possible coffee.
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Coffee 101 Skill 3 - Consistency:
Weighing, measuring and timing is essential. If you haven't already got one get yourself some coffee scales, they're an essential bit of kit.
Using a scoop to measure coffee by volume is nowhere near accurate enough to let you refine what you're doing, or repeat what you've done if you're happy with your results.
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(BTW And excuse me if I'm stating the obvious: 100mls of water weighs 100gs. Your coffee scales can also measure the amount of water you use; who knew?)
Accurately weighing your coffee and measuring the amount of water allows you to make the precise changes required to refine your brewing. Using a scoop, eyeballing water levels, and guessing the timings won't get you there. Even if you get lucky and produce a great brew, without weighing, measuring, and writing it down, you risk being in the frustrating position of not having the details to repeat what you did.
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Top Tip: Ditch the scoop, get some coffee scales and time your brewing. (And write it down!)
Coffee101 Skill 4 - Recording
Write it down. It's worth making a record of weights, measures and timings. Maybe its just a Coffee101 age thing, but experience seems to show that memory alone won't hack it. It's simple enough to do, it just needs a realistic assessment of your own powers of memory and bit of discipline to write it down before it gets forgotten.
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Top Tip: Invest in coffee knowledge and skills before more coffee kit! Rather than focusing on coffee gear, it’s worth learning how to make great coffee with something simple like the AeroPress or Clever Dripper. When you invest a bit of time in your skills; getting used to weighing, measuring, timing your brews, dialling in your grind, and especially noticing what you’re tasting so you can tweak things, you’ll get far better coffee than you would by just buying more equipment. Better still those skills will not just enable you to brew great coffee now, they'll prove to be essential if you decide you’d like to dive into the wonderful world of espresso later on.
Crucial Insight: You don't need expensive equipment to make consistenly delicious coffee. Essentials skills done well can produce great coffee.
Top Tip: Coffee101 recommends the Clever Dripper or an Aeropress as good ways to start. Both of which are relatively inexpensive, can make great coffee and the Aeropress can even make concentrated 'espresso-like' coffee 'shots' that can be turned into milk coffee drinks.
The Aeropress
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The Clever Dripper
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