Introduction to Home Brewing When you’ve decided to cut down on spending and brew at home, it takes a bit of practice to perfect the technique. There are a number of ways that you can make a delicious cup of coffee just the way a professional barista would right at home with your favorite type of coffee. Home brewing doesn’t take a whole lot of expertise, but you do have to understand a few important tips to ensure that you get all the available flavor in one cup.
Water for Your Brew
The best cups of coffee are made with clean, high-quality filtered water. Water goes through a triple filtration at most coffee shops to get the most pure ingredient as a base. Anything else can drastically change the taste of the brew. You don’t have to install a filtration system on your home faucet; there are filtered water pitchers that you can buy, or you can check out Rob Goodier’s “Ten Low-Cost Ways to Treat Water.”
Fresh Coffee
While you may think that home-brew coffee is boring, there are so many different types of roasted coffee beans you can buy to upgrade the flavor. The key is to look for quality beans and always brew with fresh ingredients. Once opened, roasted coffee beans need to be brewed within seven days. Coffee beans are typically stored in airtight containers to keep them fresh throughout the week. If you want to keep your coffee as fresh as possible, you should always make sure that beans are stored in dry, cool conditions.
Grinding Coffee
Beans One of the most important steps to the perfect home brew is grinding fresh coffee beans yourself. Once coffee beans have been ground, they should be immediately brewed. After coffee beans are ground, studies have shown that they began to oxidize just like wine. With each brewing process, you will get a different cup of coffee, but it also depends on the coarseness or fineness of the grind. For French presses, you want coarsely ground coffee beans, but for Turkish coffee, you want to grind the beans to an ultra-fine consistency. It’s important that you purchase a coffee grinder to use at home and find one that will offer the most consistent grind size.
The Right Proportions
To get the ultimate home brew, you need to have the right proportion of water to coffee. Typically, 10 grams of coffee, which is about two tablespoons, is equal to 6 ounces of water. This comes out to about .12 pounds of coffee if you have a standard French press coffee machine at home. Coffee machines typically have instructions on how coffee should be proportioned correctly as well.
Making coffee at home is a simple process if you just follow these four guidelines. You’ll be making coffee just like a professional in no time.
