Brewing the perfect coffee doesn’t have to be complicated. To get the perfect blend of taste, and that delicious coffee aroma, there are some simple techniques you should follow. There are certain factors that affect the taste of your coffee, the main ones being grind size, brewing time, and water temperature. By balancing these parameters, your coffee can taste like professional café coffee, like the coffee in knoxville at Honeybee Coffee and brewery, for instance. Here are some great tips you can use to brew the perfect coffee at home.
Use Fresh Coffee Beans
The taste and smell of your coffee depend upon the aromatic compounds present in the coffee beans. If you use old or stale coffee beans to brew your coffee, it will probably become tasteless because, with time, the aromatic compounds present in freshly roasted coffee beans vaporize, resulting in a not-so-enjoyable brew.
Plus, if you grind all your coffee beans, or get pre-grinded beans, the aromatic compounds which make your coffee taste awesome will be gone even faster because of more surface area exposed. This is why you should get fresh, roasted coffee beans, and grind them right before you brew your coffee. It will give your coffee an amazingly fresh taste and aroma.
Measure Everything With A Scale
The simple measuring of coffee beans by tablespoons doesn’t ensure that you take the perfect amount to brew the best coffee. This is because different types of coffee blends differ from each other in size and density. Two tablespoons of coffee beans might be enough for one type of blend but might be too strong or too weak for other types of blends. Therefore, it is advisable to use a scale to measure the amount of coffee beans you should brew. Using a scale would ensure you measure the mass, not the volume of the beans, and hence, good precision will be achieved.
Next, the best way to calculate the amount of coffee beans you need is to use the ratio of 1:12, for the amount of coffee beans and water, respectively. Just remember, the more coffee beans, the stronger your coffee will be. It really just depends on what you prefer.
Use Ground Coffee Beans
Grinding coffee beans right before you brew your coffee can greatly enhance the taste of the coffee. By grinding the beans to a smaller size, their exposed surface area is increased, and therefore, the aromatic and taste compounds can get extracted easily out of the coffee beans and blend into the water.
Moreover, it is important that the extraction of these compounds take place at the same rate for all the coffee beans for a perfect taste. So, a uniformed bean size is required to make that happen. By grinding coffee beans into a uniform and smaller size, you’ll be able to get the most out of them. The fine folks at Brewcoffeehome.com have some great tips on how to get the perfect grind size. This can be determined by its taste and the time it takes to brew. If the coffee gets brewed really fast, it means that the coffee bean size was too coarse and vice versa. Similarly, if the taste of the coffee is too acidic, that means the grind size was coarse, while if it tastes too bitter, the size was probably too fine.
Use Filtered Water For Best Results
The taste of your coffee will also be majorly affected by the taste of your water. If the water you use to brew coffee has any unnatural tastes or odors, it will be reflected in your coffee as well, which is why it is suggested that you use filtered water to brew your coffee. You wouldn’t think much about the type of water you use in your favorite morning drink but you should so you can get the best results.
Optimize Water Temperature
The taste-inducing compounds in coffee beans get extracted at specific temperatures, so you need to make sure the temperature of your water is optimized. If the temperature is higher or lower than the optimized temperature, then undesired flavors are extracted from the coffee beans, making your coffee taste bad. If the temperature is higher than the required limit, your coffee will get bitter while if the temperature is lower, the desired flavors won’t show up in your coffee. Generally, the perfect temperature is achieved after boiling water for 30 to 60 seconds.
Brewing coffee seems simple enough. Just boiling coffee beans with water doesn’t sound too hard, right? The straightforward process is probably the reason why you prefer coffee from cafes and coffee spots. Making the perfect coffee at home doesn’t have to be hard, you just need to keep in mind these simple tips and tricks and you’ll surprisingly be able to brew coffee like an expert in no time.
