3 Ways to make better coffee at home
Wanting to improve your coffee game at home can be an intimidating task if you don’t know where to start. We have layed out 3 easy ways below to ensure you can step up your coffee game to impress your friends and family. Because, no one deserves to drink bad coffee!
Invest in some scales
Some people might already have some of these in the kitchen. Whilst, there are many coffee-specific scales out there the kitchen scales you use for baking will be more sufficient when you’re just trying to make small improvements.
Why do I need scales? The key to making a good coffee is to ensure you have the ratio of coffee to water correct. In Espresso that’s usually 1:2 ratio and in Filter, 1:16. For example, if you put 18g of ground coffee into your portafilter you want to have 36g in the cup. For filter, that would mean 20g of ground coffee and then 320g in the cup. The scales ensure you know how much coffee you are starting with and therefore you can figure out how much water to end with. Getting the ratio right will help get good coffee every time!
Use a timer for your coffee
Now that you’ve weighed out your coffee and got an understanding of what brew ratio’s mean we can look at extraction time. In simple terms, extraction time is the amount of time it takes from when you start you pull of your shot on the espresso machine or when the first drop of water hits the coffee on your pour over.
We will use later blogs to get into more detail around recipes but for now we want to keep it simple. For espresso, you want around 25-30s extraction time for your shot. For filter 2.5mins - 3mins is around optimal as well for your coffee.
Combining the extraction time knowledge with the brew ratio information will ensure you end up with consistently great coffee.
Freshly GROUND COFFEE
We know not everyone has access to or can afford a coffee grinder but if you can this alone will improve your home coffee game by 10. Once beans are ground they instantly start to oxidate. From here the aromas and flavours are starting to disappear. This is why fresh ground coffee tastes a lot better than pre ground coffee.
Having a grinder at home will mean you can have fresh ground coffee everytime and therefore better tasting slow coffee every time.
Now that you’re armed with these 3 top tips. You can go back to those brewing machines of yours and impress your palette along with your friends and family.