Brewing the best coffee at home can be an incredible experience worth sharing with your friends, but it can also be a frustrating and costly one if you are not equipped with the know-how and helpful tools. These are THREE easy steps from a home coffee expert that you can introduce to your routine to improve your home coffee experience.
- Measure all the things
A bit of guesswork is ok for things like accounting, and whether your new fridge will fit in that small looking gap in the kitchen, but guesswork is the enemy of repeatable and consistently good coffee.
Precision matters in coffee! Weighing the coffee before roasting, dosing the coffee before grinding, and measuring the volume of coffee extracted whilst brewing will all go a long way to ensuring you get the best experience out of your coffee. With the variables locked in, you can start experimenting! The goal? Improving and learning to get the most out of your home coffee experience.
- FRESHLY roasted coffee
There’s no black and white rule on when coffee is “fresh”, but you should try to buy coffee from a roaster as close to the roast date as possible. If the roaster doesn’t have roast dates on its products, or even worse, they have a best before date, run for the hills!
The best coffee experience will come from freshly roasted coffee that is bagged soon after roasting. The coffee will have more pronounced flavours, have a rich and syrupy texture, and if you are brewing with pour over or similar, the coffee will “de-gas”, or foam up as the gasses formed during roasting are released. This is even more important if you are buying your coffee pre-ground. Speaking of pre-ground….
- Get a coffee grinder and buy whole bean coffee!
If you have no choice, pre-ground coffee is acceptable…ish. But nowadays, you can get your hands on an affordable hand-grinder that will give you a great coffee experience at home. If you are brewing through aeropress or a pour-over brew like V60, we suggest getting your hands on a hand grinder. If you are feeling industrious, you can stick the hand crank shaft into a drill. Boom! You have an electric grinder. Please don’t break your hand grinder though… maybe don’t do the drill thing, actually.
Things get a little more complicated with espresso, as the finer grind needed for good extraction means the hand grinder may struggle a bit. Consider a grinder like the Baratza Setta 270Wi, which can weigh out coffee as it grinds. A good coffee grinder will turn an average coffee into a great home coffee experience, so don’t skimp on the grinder front.