15 October 2007 by Shifrah Combiths
Cup and Grind: Grind Your Way to the Perfect Brew
Unlike wine or other specialty beverages, coffee (even after it is purchased and taken home) gives consumers an array of choices in how to prepare the eventual cup. Although it’s impossible to improve mediocre – or worse – coffee by how you prepare it, different methods of brewing yield their own unique characteristics to what you finally imbibe.
Strictly speaking, one wonders whether preparing instant coffee could be called “making” coffee at all. Nevertheless, as we know, coffee in soluble powder form for quick melting in hot water exists, and we’ve all used it. Canned or bottled coffee is obviously as hands-off as you can get, but mass market consumers, which we all are at times, often like to buy their jolts in convenient on-the-go packages. Who can blame them?
But when you can have control over it, it’s enlightening to consider what various brewing methods entail and how they affect the cup, or cups, you consume.
Each brewing method requires a specific type of grind. Purists realize that the closer the grinding occurs to the brewing, the fresher the resultant cup of coffee. So, increasingly, especially as we become more cognizant of specialty coffees, consumers are buying their coffee in whole bean form and grinding it at home. Hence, it’s important to know what kind of grind to produce in order to properly adhere to what the chosen brewing method requires. Although the grind in itself doesn’t affect the drink that much, it certainly sets the stage for what the ground coffee undergoes as it’s being brewed.
Turkish coffee necessitates the finest grind. This is how the earliest coffee was brewed, and the beans were ground to a powder with a mortar and pestle. Turkish coffee is produced by boiling. Similar to modern-day cupping techniques, the ground beans are placed in a water pot, which is then brought to a boil. Western palates are often overwhelmed by the strength of coffee produced in this manner, but it’s definitely the brewing method that keeps us the least removed from the bean.
The French press method similarly maintains contact between the hot water and the coffee grounds, which in this case must be coarse. French presses brew coffee by steeping it. Grounds are placed in the bottom of the carafe and hot water is poured over them while the plunger remains up. In this way, the grinds and the water are allowed to mingle for the recommended two to four minutes before the plunger, fitted with a screen that filters the grinds away from the water, is depressed. French press coffee makes a powerful cup in which none of the coffee’s flavorful and aromatic oils are lost as with the use of a paper filter. (On a side note, some people believe that these coffee oils are harmful and that consequently, it’s better to filter them out; however, there is no conclusive evidence to support this.)
Automatic coffee makers, most popular in North America and Europe, necessitate grinds that Goldilocks would favor – neither too course nor too fine. They use gravity to funnel hot water into a paper filter containing grinds. The water passes through the grinds and drips into the carafe below, trapping oils in the paper filter along the way. Some consider this a loss. It is true that the resulting cup of coffee is milder than the bold flavors that survive when using a French press.
Espresso, not a roast, as some would promote, was developed in Italy in the 1900s and refers to yet another way of making coffee, in which very hot, pressurized water is forced through finely ground coffee. The resultant brew is thicker than regular coffee and contains an amount of succulent dissolved solids that you won’t find in a regular cup.
Armed with this education in coffee-making, you could even embark on a coffee-tasting journey less involved than actual cupping. Try buying whole beans, invest in the accoutrements for a new method or two, and blaze new trails in your own world of coffee adventures.