What are the secrets to making perfect coffee and avoiding bitterness and sourness?
Good coffee isn't just tasty. So we're revealing it all in this master guide on how to make coffee taste good.
Ready to transform your morning coffee mug into a liquid masterpiece?
Here's everything you need to know.
Rule #1: Buy Specialty Coffee
Good coffee always starts with good coffee beans.
They are not made in a factory. Not all taste the same. They are agricultural products and therefore the diversity of flavors is 100% natural.
And that means some grains are great and others not so much. Leave low-quality beans for instant coffee. What you need to buy is Special Coffee, always!
It’s the highest-grade coffee you can buy, graded by certified “Quality Graders” who have incredibly precise taste buds.
These coffees have natural sugars, clean acidity, and lots of wild flavors.
Buy freshly roasted beans. Coffee only has 2 to 3 weeks of peak freshness before the flavor begins to rapidly diminish. Beans that sit on supermarket shelves are usually much longer than that, so skip the coffee aisle and buy directly from a roaster that roasts to order.
Take the whole grain. Ground coffee quickly decreases in quality. The small beans simply can't contain their freshness as much as whole beans - and you can taste them after just 20-30 minutes of exposure to oxygen. This means you need a burr grinder at home. Believe me, it's really worth it and no less convenient.
Coffee Storage Tips to Maximize Freshness
Once you get your freshly roasted, specialty quality coffee beans, you need to store them properly. Just remember this basic rule: no heat, no air, no light.
Heat causes food to decompose more quickly. Fresh air causes things to “oxidize” (food spoils, copper turns green,...). And light – even from a lamp – can speed up natural deterioration. Avoid these things to ensure your grains don't spoil before 2 to 3 weeks.
Rule #2: Choose your cooking method wisely
Cheap coffee makers can do the job, but they have some serious defects, for example, they don't even reach the ideal temperature. And this often leads to sour , underdeveloped flavors.
That's why we really like manual coffee makers.
You are in complete control. With a regular coffee maker, you have no control over the water temperature or brewing recipe. With a manual coffee maker, you can heat the water longer or slightly adjust your technique to get the flavor you want.
Coffee tastes better. From the outside, some manual coffee makers appear to double as coffee makers. The process is pretty much the same idea, of course, but the results are much better with a manual coffee maker — because you don't have cheap equipment messing up your drink every time.
Manual coffee makers are taking over
There are several types of manual coffee makers, but they are summarized into a few main categories:
Immersion methods, like the French press, produce robust, flavorful coffee. The coffee grounds and water steep for 2 to 4 minutes, which reveals a rich flavor you'll never get from an automatic coffee maker.
The Chemex or Hario V60 to make a cleaner, more nuanced coffee. The paper filter, combined with the careful technique of pouring water (not the chaotic flooding you get with coffee makers), leads to amazing coffee.
There are also some unique methods, such as the AeroPress (lightly pressurized), the moka pot (a stovetop espresso machine) and the siphon (creates a vacuum to prepare coffee).
Tip: It's hard to beat the French press for beginners. The preparation process is very simple and the coffee is incredibly delicious.
Rule #3: Use the best quality water
Many people think this next idea is a stretch – and many people are wrong.
Coffee is 98% water, so don't you think your water should taste good too?
A small amount of minerals in water helps enhance the flavor, but too much and you'll end up with a dull, lifeless drink. If your local water supply is “hard” (has a lot of calcium or magnesium hardness), you will want to filter the water.
This is the problem most people have when they buy beans at a coffee shop and then realize they don't taste the same at home. Cafes use special filtered water, but most people just use tap water.
And don't forget the water temperature
Remember how most coffee makers don't even reach the right temperature?
As a rule, the water should be between 90 and 96 degrees Celsius.
In this range, the water extracts the delicious flavors of the coffee quickly enough without over- extracting the bitter flavors.
Below 90 degrees 👉 very slow extraction 👉 sour coffee
More than 96 degrees 👉 very fast extraction 👉 bitter coffee
Check your local altitude , as the higher the altitude, the lower the temperature the water needs to boil.
Sea level: 100 degrees
1,000 feet: 98 degrees
3,000 feet: 96 degrees
5,000 feet: 94 degrees
7,000 feet: 92 degrees
Therefore, if you live at sea level, you need to wait a few minutes for the water to cool down after boiling. At 3,000 feet, you can use the water immediately after boiling. And if you're 7,000 feet up, it's best to start preparing your extraction immediately while it's boiling to ensure you stay in the right temperature range.
Rule #4: Stick to the coffee to water ratio
How much coffee should you use?
The proportion may vary according to your taste, but it is around 1 gram of coffee for 10g of water (1:10) which is most used here in Brazil.
And it can reach 1 gram of coffee for 15-18 grams of water (1:15-18).
Using the right balance of coffee and water does two things:
Strength – making sure the flavor is balanced, neither weak nor too strong
Flavor – creating a balanced extraction, not too much (bitter) nor too little (sour)
Imagine making a cup of coffee with a single bean. It wouldn't work. It would be so weak that you could barely taste it, but even if you could taste it, it would be very bitter - because that grain had access to a lot of fresh water, which led to over-extraction (all the bitter stuff came out).
Now imagine making a cup of coffee with five hundred beans. There would hardly be any liquid coffee because the beans would absorb everything. And if any liquid escaped into your mug, it would be super concentrated (strong) madness. However, it would also taste very sour because there wasn't enough water to extract a balanced flavor from the powder – just enough to get the acids.
Rule #5: Learning to Taste Your Specialty Coffee and Make Small Changes
Now you know 95% of what it takes to make coffee-quality coffee.
The last thing to learn is how to taste your coffee, troubleshoot flavor issues, and make small adjustments to your recipe to make it even better.
5 stages of extraction
When you make coffee, the water literally pulls substances (acids, sugars, oils, solids) out of the beans. Also known as extraction . See how this happens:
Stage 1 is acidic . Bright, spicy, tart - you know what we're talking about. These are some of the first things to be extracted from the coffee. You identify this flavor on the sides of your tongue.
Stage 2 is mild flavors. Organic compounds, natural oils and other things begin to dissolve. This calms the acids and creates a more diverse flavor profile.
Stage 3 is sugars. The natural sugars come next, coating all the other flavors with a gentle sweetness. This is where the good drinking ends! You identify this flavor on the tip of your tongue.
Stage 4 is bitter . After sugars, only bitter acids remain. They cancel out the sugars and make the coffee taste dull, so stop brewing before this point. You identify this flavor at the end of your tongue, close to your throat.
When tasting your coffee, hold it in your mouth for a while, on your taste buds, and try to imagine where you think it fits into these stages.
Is it sour and has a thin taste? You're probably halfway through Stage 2, but not enough for the acids to balance out with a full flavor.
Is it bitter and bland ? You've almost certainly moved on to Stage 4, eliminating the good flavors from the first three stages.
How to fix your coffee?
Here are the two main strategies for brewing your coffee:
Change the preparation time. For method like French press, where the coffee is infused until you stop it directly, you can easily change the brewing time. Adding or cutting just 15 seconds can make a difference.
Adjust the grind size. Finer grains are extracted more slowly and coarse grains are extracted faster. If your coffee is poorly extracted, grind finer next time. If the flavor is extracted too much, try a coarser grind to slow extraction. And for pouring over the brew, remember that adjusting the grind size will also adjust the rate at which the water drains (impacting the total brew time).
Action Step: Start with Rule #1
So this is where you should start: Rule #1.
Always special coffee!!!
You can build on this, but specialty coffee gets you 75% of the way to a coffee AND start discovering diverse flavors like:
Sweet and bright, like a strawberry 🍓
Full but soft, like a peach 🍑
Or maybe you prefer…
Deep and creamy, like dark chocolate 🍫
Warm and complex, like chestnut 🌰
Explore this incredible diversity and fall even more in love with the world of specialty coffee.
Now, let me know what your coffee experience is like and what can be improved for a perfect extraction.
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