I run a startup[1] for quality control in the craft beverage industry (coffee, beer, distilling), and we have over 7,000 full sensory reviews of the flavor profile from various brewing methods.
I would highly suggest that anyone interested in brewing better coffee at home (or in the office, etc), invest in the following:
1) freshly roasted coffee - flavor profile degradation begins around day ~10 in most 3rd wave light-medium roast coffees. I would suggest Intelligentsia coffee, Blue Bottle, Stumptown, or Counter Culture. These guys are the "big 4" and trying either single origin or blends from them will give you a better idea of what to look for in high quality beans.
2) a conical burr grinder. Do not use a spice grinder (whirly blade) which will shatter the bean causing large amounts of micro-fines and make your coffee bitter. Capresso makes an OK home grinder, or (if you have the patients for it) the Hario hand grinder (with a ceramic burr) is excellent (but takes a while.... though it can be used in situations lacking electricity). In our dataset, conical grinders increase the Perceived Quality of "3rd wave" beans by 1.4 standard deviations on average - there is almost no effect on burnt beans or lesser coffee.
3) a Chemex or French Press. These are both simple, elegant, and allow you to make a range of quantities depending on how much coffee you have and who's drinking. Both of these brew methods score .75 standard deviations higher in perceived quality than average with less experienced (in our dataset that means 'non-expert') tasters. The average perceived quality can be further improved by correct dosing and pouring methods.
4) a swan neck kettle. This is 80% of what you need to to perfect your pouring method. The rest is practice.
Finally, one of the best things that you can do is record and rank the coffees you consume. This will help you objectively remember what you liked and disliked about the product, and gain intuition on your preferences. My company's tools are built for professional tasters in quality control, but anyone serious about coffee could find suitable use for it. Gastrograph Review is available free on the Google play store here[2].
I buy my coffee from a local chain: Dunn Bros, always within few days of roasting. Often the same day it was roasted. After having a particularly good cup of coffee there (they offer a "free" large cup of the variety of the day with every pound you purchase), I went on a quest to understand why their coffee always tasted better than mine. Finally it came down to the grind as the last variable and it totally blew my mind how different the taste was whether I bought it ground from them or with my "whirlybird" grinder.
Ground in store, made with a cheap drip brewer tastes infinitely better than ground at home with the crappy grinder and a French press. Unbelievable!
You may be right. But there is something more important than the grind that very few people will tell you about.
Water.
I suspect the store has RO water (reverse osmosis)+(possibly with remineralisation).
RO + Remineralisation is not easy, cheap or conducive for most homes. There are a few ways around this:
a. Always start with water from the cold water tap. Lets it run for 10-30 seconds if possible.
b. Use a thermometer if you're not already using one. You should find your ideal temp. in the 195-205F range.
c. You could use bottled water. Not as cheap as tap water, way cheaper than RO.
d. Invest in a decent grinder. It does not have to be expensive. If you don't mind some hard work, look into the Hario Skerton or Hario Mini Mill. In the lower range you could find something like a Breville or a Baratza Encore. If you absolutely must you could get a Cuisinart Burr Mill (Should be about $40).
e. Since you mentioned that you often buy coffee on the same day as it was roasted. Most coffee's don't taste spectacular on the day they were roasted and need 1-7 days to de-gas. When you buy it that fresh, move it to a glass jar and leave the lid slightly open for 5-12 hours. After the close the lid. Attempt at not consuming the coffee for 1 - 2 days.
Regardless how long ago the coffee was roasted keep it in a glass jar and air tight. Oxygen and air in general kills coffee. Quick.
It has the strange and useful behavior of spraying the fine particles (the "dust") against the top of the cup, where the stick, whereas the larger, correctly-sized particles fall to the bottom. After I grind, I carefully slide my finger to remove the dust from the top/side of the cup before pouring the grounds into my brew device.
Less dust = less over-extraction = less bitter.
I wish there were a sub-$100 burr grinder that doesn't suck... but alas.
There are, they just require a little elbow greece ;) In particular, the Porlex pointed out above has dropped in price quite a bit (I bought mine for $80 on amazon a year ago - now it's only $40).
Brewing coffee is all about extracting good tasting stuff from ground coffee beans - some factors which affect extraction include:
Water temperature (hotter water => more extraction)
Grind size (finer grind => more extraction)
Brew time (longer time => more extraction)
Overextracted coffee tends to taste bitter (or, as many people say when they're used to bad coffee, "like coffee" :)) and underextracted tends to taste sour. A bad grinder won't give you a uniform result (some will be more coarse, some will be more fine). Brewing should match up an appropriate water temperature + brew time with your grind size, but if your grind isn't uniform the coarser stuff will underextract and the finer stuff will overextract. So your coffee can end up having both sour/bitter flavor if the grind isn't even.
I think it's just what the OP said: uneven grind. The grinder I used gave a result that was fine powder with largish and small chunks in it. Their grinder was a smooth, even grind. As far as I can tell, that was the primary determinant in the taste difference.
Another recommendation on the brewing is the AeroPress (http://www.amazon.com/Aeropress-Coffee-and-Espresso-Maker/dp...). Pour overs are great and I love my Chemex, but if you're looking to brew a single serving - or want something which is easy to pack for travel - the AeroPress is incredibly hard to beat. It's cheap, fast, small, easy to clean, and makes it trivial to consistently brew a great cup of coffee. The Porlex grinder mentioned above happens to fit exactly inside the AeroPress too.
If you're going to do a pour over, a gooseneck kettle really helps. If you don't, it's nice to have but not a necessity. Either way this kettle might be one of the most useful appliances I have: http://www.amazon.com/Bonavita-Variable-Temperature-Electric.... It's a gooseneck kettle with digital temperature control, built-in timer, and hold function. You give it a temperature and it'll keep your water there for an hour. It's ridiculously convenient.
FWIW, I started off with a French press, which uses a coarser metal mesh to separate the grounds from the coffee. Because of this you often end up with a small amount of "coffee ground sludge" at the bottom of your French press. The remnants continue to "brew" in your cup after you remove the rest of the coffee grounds, so you might end up with more bitter, overextracted coffee if you aren't careful.
I've been waiting for a chance to ask this...I bought an AeroPress and it made really sour coffee. I tried again, used the same coffee in my drip machine, timed it carefully in the Aeropress, got the temperature exactly right, and still, the Aeropress coffee was much more sour than what I got from my old machine.
Am I doing something wrong, or do people just like sour coffee? I really hated it. I've had coffee from a French press and thought it was great.
An aeropress makes a really good cup of coffee. It does take some practice though. There are a few things you can do to fix the sourness. Sourness is usually the outcome of low temperature and under-extraction. I suspect in your case it may be more of the latter.
1. Invest in a food thermometer - if you don't already have one. I personally like brewing around 197F - 200F range.
To find your sweet spot try it at 207F and work your way down. There is a way around this (see point 3).
2. Check the grind size. If you are buying store bought coffee that is pre-ground the grain size may be too large. the Aeropress can handle much finer grinds, not quite an espresso grind, but close.
The reason this is important, is if the grind size is larger the water may not penetrate all the way and or have more heat loss than advisable.
3. Pre-infusion - Soak/wet one part ground coffee to two parts water (or enough to just about cover) for 30-45 seconds in the aeropress(see point 4) or in a separate pitcher, before you add additional water. The pitcher works well, but adds to cleaning effort.
The trick I've found with the Aeropress is to disregard the manufacturer instructions and add a lot more water than they suggest. If you look at the Aeropress championship winners, they all fill up the Aeropress with water rather than putting in just a bit of water like the directions suggest (and then diluting later).
In my experience, Aeropress yields a great cup of coffee much faster than any of the pour over techniques and drippers.
This is likely a function of your grind size. I've had this happen in the past and once I got the grind size set right, things were much better.
If what you're doing now works well in a drip coffee machine and a french press you probably want a smaller grind size. I usually do well aiming somewhere between the drip and espresso settings on my grinder.
Might be the coffee itself. Some coffees are more acidic than others. Two things helped me greatly: (1). Try some milk/cream in your coffee, it helps cut the sourness. (2). If you get the chance, try the Honey Badger from Intelligentsia coffee, it has an amazing inherent sweetness, like a faint aroma of freshly made molasses.
IMO coffee should taste fine when nothing is added, even without sugar. Sugar / dairy should just be needed because of one's particular taste, not to mask anything in the coffee.
Check out the Stumptown Aeropress tutorial, it's been really great. Also keep in mind the Aeropress puts out the equivalent of a double expresso so you would have to "Americano" it into coffee by a 1:1 dilution w hot water.
That Bonavita kettle is amazing. I have one as well and once you get one, you use it for everything. Being able to dial in on the temperature is great for teas or for making a miso soup at a comfortable temperature instead of scalding hot.
I use the Hario hand grinder and it is by far the best grinder for anyone that is price conscious. It is significantly less expensive that other ceramic burr grinders. The only draw back is that you must manually crank it and this takes time. That said, a single serving of coffee takes only about 2 minutes to grind so it really isn't that bad unless you are preparing a larger number of servings at once.
> The only draw back is that you must manually crank it...
I think of this as a feature.
A serious drawback though is to be careful when handling -- an errant bump of the glass globe against the ceramic burrs means (at best) a chip in the glass.
My housemate pointed out that the Hario grinder has the same threads as a mason jar, so chipped glass might not be a big deal. But damaging the burrs probably means buying a new grinder.
I've been using a Baratza Virtuoso grinder for 2 years now. I'm really happy with it, and it probably suffices for everything up to super fine espresso grinds. ~$200 on amazon [1] -- $230 right now but watch it for a couple days [2]. Just one warning: if you live in an apartment, it produces a fairly loud low grumbling sound. I think it's fine, but if you have super thin walls up get up at the crack of dawn it's something to consider.
Once I found Stumptown House Blend, it became my espresso's staple. If you are used to Starbucks, it is certainly an eye opened about what a well roasted quality bean can produce in flavor and smoothness.
How does a Chemex or French Press compare to a Moka pot? I like the strength of my Moka pot coffee which is somewhere in between an espresso and an Americano or drip coffee.
After going through the hassle of 1-50 steps to make perfect coffee over and over, I relish a powerfully flavoured drink where you just pour hot water over leaves.
Normal coffee pots splash. Coffee beans after being ground and applying hot water to them are very delicate. A goose/swan neck kettle helps keep the pouring both gentle and consistent to get even extraction. I put off getting a good kettle for way too long and I was seriously surprised how much of a difference it made.
I absolutely love coffee. And I don't mean that in a way that I'm dependent on it to be awake and get work done. Coffee is my second biggest hobby just after programming. I'm so glad Nick Cho is the author of this article because he's the person who turned me on to the Kalita[0] products that have taken my home coffee brewing addiction to a whole new level. Nick also has another great video of the technicalities of brewing pourover coffee[1]. It's a great watch.
I think coffee is a lot like programming, really. Coffee is incredibly simple when you distill it down to the basics, which is what pourovers do. Hot water, ground beans, gravity and time. That's it. And just like software, we have complicated the heck out of coffee with all of these electronic machines that promise a decent cup of coffee in 30 seconds.
Coffee is something I love to share with other people. As I've gone from workplace to workplace I always bring my hand grinder, kettle and Kalita dripper with me. After the eyebrows are done being raised, my coworkers have always embraced the quality of the coffee as well as the fun experience of making coffee together. It's been great for the culture of the companies I've worked at.
I almost always do a pourover at home in the morning (except the last two mornings when I was out of filters and did a french press instead). I think they're significantly better than what you can get out of an automatic coffee maker, and easier than any other coffee-making process I've seen.
It's kind of odd that there aren't any links given to buy the stuff you need to get started:
There are a couple other things I do to simplify or improve the process:
* Wet the inside of the filter holder. This'll make it easier to get the filter to stay put.
* Wet the filter once it's in the holder, but before you fill it with coffee. I think this makes a difference in the final taste.
I use a rounded tablespoon of coffee grounds per 4-5oz water (i.e. two for a regular cup of coffee, and three for a travel mug). I don't worry about water temperature outside of whether or not it was recently brought to a boil.
My experience has been that if you are pouring every day and your technique is really good, than a pourover will have slightly more complex flavors. But an Aeropress will be almost just as good and be much more consistent and have a much flatter learning curve. I always recommend an Aeropress to people getting into nice coffee. A pourover is much more theatrical and looks more impressive, though :/
You don't really...
Espresso makes highly concentrated brewed coffee that people consider to be closer to espresso.
The 'debate' is that any coffee pulled under pressure is technically espresso - but (real, read: not home machines) pull espresso shots at ~9 bar. Aeropress generates about 1.5 - 2 bars of pressure, and thus is... something between coffee and espresso. Most people have taken to calling it "Espresso style coffee" which is like calling Tofurky meat style tofu. WAT?
Anyway, most people (but not me) dilute their Aeropress coffee in water to make a Americano-style drink, so its not really comparable at this point to a true pour-over anyway.
All that said, I think aeropress makes quite good coffee - but its not a replacement for a pourover, and there's a lot more batch variation due to the lack of control in an aeropress.
I love my Aeropress. I make a single cup from 20g of lightly roasted coffee beans, that I grind in a blade grinder because thats the one available around here (Brazil). I don't dillute this very much - sometimes 10% to just to fill the cup.
This "pourover renaissance" is very surprising - its how everyone "down here" does their coffee[1] for the last hundred years and, at least with my way of doing it, doesn't produce anything as flavorful as the Aeropress...
If you use your Aeropress daily, check out the S Filter from Kaffeologie -- it's a mesh filter. It allows for more oil to come through instead being absorbed by the paper. I find it's best with an inverted process, but that's personal preference.
The filter is pricey for what it is, but it does have a lifetime warranty.
There's a subtle difference in taste. It's also much easier to make with the Aeropress. I really get very consistent results with it, whereas pour-over can be more difficult to get the timing right.
On the other hand, it's more fun to make a pourover. Aeropress feels like a toy in comparison. Feels like not much skill is involved.
Aeropress is something between filter/pourover and french press. I think it produces better tasting coffee than both of these methods most of the time.
I'll disagree. A paper filter with grounds pulled out of a Chemex, Kalita, Hario V60, etc. is a lot easier to clean than an Aeropress, which I'll agree is an improvement over the mess that a French Press makes. A paper filter keeps the grounds contained in a way that makes composting simple, rather than washing half the grounds down the drain.
With the Aeropress I brew directly into the cup, then I move it over the garbage can and press the thing to throw away the compacted paper filter and coffee.
Then just rinse the Aeropress - which you could even skip if you're really lazy/green.
Friends more familiar with making their own espresso seem to love the Aeropress. Friends familiar with pour over seem to moonlight with Aeropress now and then.
I roast coffee at home and have been experimenting a lot with ratios and techniques for brewing. I've come to realize that my favorite technique is cold brewing. For home coffee brewing, I think it's underrated. I make a batch on the weekend, and for the rest of the week I have coffee ready to drink whenever I want it. The concentrate can last a long time without any big changes in the flavor profile, and I can make coffee of varying strengths (by adjusting the water dilution). I highly recommend cold brewing at home if you like coffee and have yet to try it.
I always wanted to try that. Care to share your technique, or link to a recommended one? I read that it uses a lot of raw coffee. I don't roast at home; these days I'm ashamed to say that I don't even grind fresh.
I grind fresh for my Aeropress, but use pre-ground (or grind-at-the-store) for cold brew and try to make it that day. You can do it in a large mason jar with several paper filters, but I use a Toddy system I got as a gift.
Basically it's 12 OZ ground coffee + 7 cups of water in the bucket. I let that sit on the counter for 12-24 hours, then run it through a very fine filter (~1 cm thick piece of felt). This produces a concentrate that I store in the fridge. Dilute 1:1 or 1:2 with milk and/or water before drinking. It's good heated or over ice.
After reading about it in "Modernist Cuisine at Home", I picked up the Toddy[1] cold brew device.
My wife and I both love the results. It comes with 2 filters, which last for about 10 batches each. Each batch takes 12-24 hours in produce in the fridge. We consume it in about a week.
The downside to the Toddy is that it is basically a carafe with a big plastic bucket. When done brewing, you put the carafe in the fridge and store the brewing "bucket". A friend of mine has the Hario[2] -- it is a much more attractive unit, and as an all-in-one you can keep the entire device in the fridge. When it is time to order replacement filters for the Toddy, I think I'm going to pick up the Hario instead and give that a try.
Either way -- the quality of the coffee has been fantastic. Super easy to brew, and really nice having it already ready to go in the morning when we are rushing out the door.
> A friend of mine has the Hario[2] -- it is a much more attractive unit, and as an all-in-one you can keep the entire device in the fridge. When it is time to order replacement filters for the Toddy, I think I'm going to pick up the Hario instead and give that a try.
I have the Hario (bought it last week, in fact) and like it a lot. 80g of ground beans (same coarseness as my Aeropress), fill it up and once it's full, in the fridge for 10-12 hours. The filter is very easy to clean and the whole thing is made from thick glass, so I'm not too worried about cracking it from an accidental bump.
And cold brew with a dash of milk is very, very good. Much (much) healthier than the sugar-loaded (65g per 500mL!) stuff from the supermarket too, which I recommend everyone avoid regardless.
Grind ~2x what you usually use for X amount of coffee. Toss in cold water (I use old (glass) milk bottles). Let it sit for 24 hours. Filter. I personally just pour it through one of these because I like keeping the oils in my coffee: http://www.amazon.com/Finium-Brewing-Basket-medium/dp/B0037S...
Details beyond that can be figured out. The basics are that easy, and basically no matter what you do it'll be better than any store-bought cold brew.
I started cold brewing for everyone at work. It's very simple, takes about 3 minutes a day.
You just need a jar, a burr grinder, and freshly roasted coffee. Grind the coffee rather roughly, put it in the jar with cold water, screw the jar shut, shake it up, and leave it overnight. Then run the solution through a standard paper filter into a second jar and serve over ice. If you're really intense about it you can also pour the same solution into your ice cube tray to make cold brew ice cubes, to avoid diluting your precious concoction.
I save all the old beans from when I get a new batch before finishing the old bag and every few months I do a big cold brew batch. It does use way more coffee than hot brewing.
I do 1/3 cup coffee grounds per cup of water, put it all in a mixing bowl in the fridge overnight, and the next day strain it with a very fine mesh. Lasts for a week or two in the fridge
I grabbed myself a http://bruer.co. They're not perfect devices, but for the price, they're an easy way to get into it. The nicer variants are all $200US+ (and then, for me, international shipping :().
IMHO this is a fantastic way to make sweet, very flavorful iced coffee without it being too weak or containing an acidic aftertaste. On especially hot days it's nice to freeze some into large square or spherical ice cubes to put in glasses of iced coffee later. Serious Eats also has a great article on cold brewing:
I'm not a huge fan of cold brewing for normal coffee -- but then again, I kind of like a slight bitter taste to it (and I tend to drink it black). My technique was crazy simple though, so maybe I didn't do it very well?
I did, however, cold brew a whole bunch of coffee to use in a coffee oatmeal stout that I brewed once, and it was absolutely amazing.
I do this with a Toddy, and previously with large mason jars. It tastes great heated and makes for the best iced coffee. I love that I can dilute entirely with milk or water. You're right it tastes good for up to 2 weeks or so, but do you know anything about the caffeine content through that time? I figure (especially in the fridge) it should be pretty stable, but I don't have the domain knowledge to be certain of this.
Pourover is great because it lets you get intimate with the variables. Good coffee is in a state of tension, between bitter and sour flavors. If you find your coffee doesn't taste good, it's usually out of balance in one direction.
Luckily there are several ways to nudge your coffee toward one end or the other of the continuum, they are related as follows:
not to lessen your ideal,
but both sour and bitter fall into a category of complex flavors.
I absolutely agree that good coffee is a balance of sour (acidity) and bitter, but I take acceptation to the idea that it's a balance betwen these 2 flavors;
a coffee can be both very sour and very bitter!
Consider - nearly all of the complexity in coffee is from the development of acids as the coffee is growing, and the conversion of amino acids and proteins during the roasting process (Maillard reaction) of the bean;
if you over roast the bean the coffee will breakdown too far and develop carbonates, which are both cancerous and unpalatable. That's one type of bitter.
Coffee that's roasted a little less (but still far too much) will contain a campfire note (smokiness).
In both of these instances, good acids (which cause sourness) such as malic, tannic, and citric, are broken down - while less palatable acidic compounds such as acrylamide are produced.
I agree with you. From my experience, as you begin to over extract the bean it transitions from bitter to sour. I think sour is just the very extreme case of over extraction.
Get a hot-air popcorn popper. A $3 one from Goodwill (thrift shop / flea market) will do, so long as the heating chamber is metal. Pour about 3/4 cup of green coffee beans in (you'll learn to adjust this to the popper). Turn it on. Wait until you hear the beans crack (you'll know) ... keep going just until you start to hear the beans crack again. Turn off, pour beans into cool steel pans, swirl them around until pan warms, repeat until beans are cool.
Home-roasted coffee, cheap, fresh. Your pour-over/Aeropress/etc process will have a foamy head much taller than you've ever seen. Flavor will be wonderful & rich.
Oh, and do the roasting outside. You'll stink up the kitchen good.
There is a golden ratio to brewing that has been determined to be 17.42 units of water per 1 unit of coffee. I have found this to be pretty spot on and most roaster recommend brew methods are right around this number. This isn't a definitive number, but a good baseline to begin with.
One of thing of note is there is most definitely variation between roasters, regions and even within the same bag. I've had certain regions come out with different tastes from different roasters. I've also had bags go from awesome to crap back to awesome all within a week of delivery.
Marco says, for example, that the CO2 thing is bullshit i.e. doesn't affect the coffee in ways he can notice. This is the kind of thing I'm most interested: someone who made all the experiences and came to a conclusion.
Is the CO2 thing specific to letting roasted coffee sit X days before use and blooming? While I haven't really tried to see if blooming matters when it comes to taste (it's a good indicator of bean freshness), I can say there is a difference in days since roast impacting taste. Beans release gas after roast and if you have some too close to roast date the taste can be dramatically different from a day or two later. In fact I've seen recommendations of beans best used for espresso have rested for 5-7 days post roast.
Your pour over brewing experience can be greatly enhanced by roasting your own coffee. It's surprisingly easy to do. Unroasted green beans cost half what roasted beans go for. You'll never have a dull pour over moment again. The roaster I started with and still use is the Behmor 1500 ($300). You can get started for closer to $150 (e.g., http://www.burmancoffee.com/roasting_equipment.html)
If you're in the US, there are several great home roasting web sites where you can buy fresh coffees from all around the world.
I'm having a hard time getting the current "hype" about pourover coffee. To me it generally tastes like Grandma's drip coffee. IMHO, it takes pressure and heat to really extract maximum flavor from the beans, thus espresso has been invented.
I've used a 6-cup Bialetti Moka Express for the last 6 years, it was the only piece of kitchen equipment we packed into our hand-luggage when we flew over to the states. It extracts a strong, flavourful liquor from most every coffee, although the typical US pre-ground coffee is a bit courser than optimal.
Steam pressure buildup in the reservoir forces sub-boiling water through the grind; not as high-pressure as an espresso machine so crema extraction is non-existent, but delivers a similar taste.
Why can't/hasn't this technique be automated into a "pourover-style" drip coffeemaker? If such a thing already exists, are cultural factors the only reason it hasn't displaced manual labor in frou-frou coffeehouses?
I used a Chemex until I dropped and broke it one day and then replaced it with a Bona Vita automatic drip coffee maker that I'm rather pleased with. The Bona Vita is oft-cited on the various forums I researched as striking a good balance of value and quality for demanding coffee connoisseurs willing to venture into a non-pourover option. It is supposedly "engineered" for optimal brewing temperature, water/grounds contact time and uses a shower head for good, uniform coffee grounds saturation.
I'll second that. It's really excellent if you don't have the patience for pour over brewing. I recently discovered the baby Chemex ($30), which works really well brewing for two people. It's smaller and stockier than the usual 6–8 cup Chemex pots, and probably won't break as easily.
Pod machines make terrible coffee though.[1] I'm no coffee snob at all and even I can agree that the coffee that they produce sucks.
I've never had pour over coffee (or even heard of it until just now) but I gotta say I'm very curious now. Is it common at coffee shops or do you have to buy the stuff and do it at home if you want to try it?
Yeah, I guess I've never had pod coffee, I was just pointing out that if you squint a little bit, they are a machine making a sort of pour over.
I don't frequent coffee shops, but I don't think I've ever seen pour over as a choice. You can often find plastic filter holders for ~$3, so you don't need a lot of equipment to give it a try.
most drip machines' major failing is the water brews too cool (should be approx 195-205f). There are a slew of newer drip machines that pay attention to brew temps and apparently brew a pretty good cup of coffee. The Moccamaster Technivorm was the first popular machine to do so.
Their are automated pour over machines out there, and they seem to be getting more popular recently. However, I doubt they will ever completely replace the manual pour over devices since everyone has their own technique when it comes to pour over, and everyone's technique yields a different taste. And that's ignoring the fact that different beans may require adjusting your pour over technique. It's the same with making espresso, sure some companies have made machines that automate most of the process and many people do use them, but in the craft coffee world, it's unlikely that they will ever become the standard.
They do. http://gizmodo.com/5773089/this-robot-hand-pours-coffee-bett.... You can even get cheaper ones for your house. I can't say why they haven't replaced people, but I suspect it is cultural. The air of expertise that people get from those who make pour over coffee in so called "frou-frou" coffee houses is part of the price.
In principle a quality machine like a MoccaMaster could control water temperature and rate better than pour-over. Pour-over seems like a pricing strategy for coffee that didn't come out of an espresso machine.
I'm really intrigued as to how much of the coffee connoisseur's appreciation of a coffee is down to the flavour and how much is actually down to a placebo style effect and the enjoyment of the ritual.
I love an espresso and make myself one every day but I can't shake the idea that if there were some blind taste tests 95% of the people who say they can really taste the difference between different pourings/grindings etc. (including myself) couldn't tell an aeropress from an old school drip filter machine.
I think you're right that the ritual accounts for a lot of the pleasure, and I'm okay with that. Another drink I love, yerba mate, is all about the ritual. I don't know if this is universally the case, but the protocol I was taught includes the proper way to prepare the mate in the gourd, that the host always pours new hot water in, that making the sucking sound when you're out of hot water is okay (and I think even encouraged), and that everyone drinks from the same gourd together. It's an acquired taste, but the company and friendship that the ritual begets is worth the initial palate shock.
This is pretty much exactly what I do, and I based it on instructions I got over at CoffeeGeek. There is one difference with their method, though, and that is that they recommend that you give it quick stir after the second pour. Does anyone know why this might be good or bad?
This is how I made coffee when I lived in Costa Rica! Most people there prefer this method, even if they can afford a machine http://i.imgur.com/kDKCuMa.jpg
Indeed, "pourover": because "drip" requires a euphimism!
"drip" is often a negative word: liquid is falling from something, and it is not wanted. Careful not to drip on the carpet! You're dripping with sweat! Oil is dripping out of your engine's rear main seal ...
Also, "drip" is used as slang epithet in some English-speaking parts of the world. A drip is a person without a strong character: a lamer, downer, etc.
I'm glad we don't have to call it "drip" coffee any more; though "pourover" is uncomfortably close to "pushover", which is one of the synonyms that aforementioned slang use of "drip". :)
" Start with a grind size around that of coarse sugar. (Think Sugar in the Raw.)" Does anyone know what type of grind this would be (e.g. french press, conical)?
I run a startup[1] for quality control in the craft beverage industry (coffee, beer, distilling), and we have over 7,000 full sensory reviews of the flavor profile from various brewing methods.
I would highly suggest that anyone interested in brewing better coffee at home (or in the office, etc), invest in the following:
1) freshly roasted coffee - flavor profile degradation begins around day ~10 in most 3rd wave light-medium roast coffees. I would suggest Intelligentsia coffee, Blue Bottle, Stumptown, or Counter Culture. These guys are the "big 4" and trying either single origin or blends from them will give you a better idea of what to look for in high quality beans.
2) a conical burr grinder. Do not use a spice grinder (whirly blade) which will shatter the bean causing large amounts of micro-fines and make your coffee bitter. Capresso makes an OK home grinder, or (if you have the patients for it) the Hario hand grinder (with a ceramic burr) is excellent (but takes a while.... though it can be used in situations lacking electricity). In our dataset, conical grinders increase the Perceived Quality of "3rd wave" beans by 1.4 standard deviations on average - there is almost no effect on burnt beans or lesser coffee.
3) a Chemex or French Press. These are both simple, elegant, and allow you to make a range of quantities depending on how much coffee you have and who's drinking. Both of these brew methods score .75 standard deviations higher in perceived quality than average with less experienced (in our dataset that means 'non-expert') tasters. The average perceived quality can be further improved by correct dosing and pouring methods.
4) a swan neck kettle. This is 80% of what you need to to perfect your pouring method. The rest is practice.
Finally, one of the best things that you can do is record and rank the coffees you consume. This will help you objectively remember what you liked and disliked about the product, and gain intuition on your preferences. My company's tools are built for professional tasters in quality control, but anyone serious about coffee could find suitable use for it. Gastrograph Review is available free on the Google play store here[2].
[1] www.Gastrograph.com [2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.gastrograp...