How to Improve Your Coffee Drinking Experience

Let’s make coffee…you want to join in?  It’s really easy and I’ll show you all the things that I do to make sure I’m only drinking really good stuff (without spending gobs of cash). 

Just follow along:

• For me, the process begins with selecting the right beans.  I want a good, interesting coffee bean so that I can brew something delicious and also have something uncommon, but delicious to share with my friends.  Beans have to be grown somewhere – why not learn about that place they came from and how the bean was grown.  I can get this kind of information simply by buying my whole bean coffee from a local roaster, who knows the farmers who grew the bean, and who knows a lot about the history of its origin.  Oh, and I save major bucks since I’m buying it straight from the source.
• Once I’ve acquired the right beans, it is time to grind them into perfect, even, extractable coffee grounds.  I can do this by using a burr coffee grinder.  These don’t have to be expensive, and if you really want to cut costs you can buy a manual coffee grinder.  I still use my manual hand grinder almost every day – the conical burrs have not worn out, and the handle and gear mechanisms are all still as functional as they were the day I opened the box.
• Now it is time for us to actually brew some coffee.  However, unlike most people I tend to stray away from the stereotypical drip coffee makers.  I know it’s pretty convenient, but when you start to use other methods of brewing you realize it really isn’t much more convenient than anything else, and it’s seriously lacking when it comes to getting the maximum extraction of flavor from the bean.  If you take the time to select an intriguing and flavorful whole coffee bean from a local roaster, and then you grind it using conical burrs, why would you waste all of that flavor on a poor little drip coffee maker?  I recommend trying a pour over apparatus.  They’re amazingly similar to drip pots in that all you do is pour hot water over the cone – and yet because they immerse the bean (instead of dripping water) they allow for a very thorough flavor profile in the resulting cup. 

  You can get pour over cones for under $20 – my first one was the Hario v60 which I use quite consistently.  It’s made of ceramic but it’s surprisingly durable and can be used to brew a single cup or a full eight cup pot of coffee if you’re entertaining guests.  It’s pretty awesome.

This is how I brew coffee – not just because it allows a nice extraction and a fantastic cup of coffee, but because it is really inexpensive and doesn’t take much time or effort.  I can be a pretty lazy person from time to time, and it’s nice to have systems in place that allow me to be relaxed without sacrificing flavor in my daily rituals.  So try out pour over coffee, go talk to a local coffee roaster, and if you haven’t already, go find a conical burr grinder that suits your needs.  I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how much flavor you can get from a coffee bean when you have the right tools for the job.

Tags: burr coffee grinder, pour over coffee

Category: Life at Home