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5 Ways To Improve Your Brew

Posted By admin, April 03,2014, in Aeropress, Guide, Home Brew, Pour Over

The following five changes to your brew method are guaranteed to improve your caffeine experience.

1. Check Your Temperature

What happens when you pour boiling water on your skin? It burns! Coffee is no different, it’s delicate so don’t pour boiling water straight onto your grounds. We’ve found the best temperature to brew coffee is between 85 and 90 degrees. So next time, either use a thermometer or leave your boiled water to sit 45 seconds before you start.

2. Change Your Grind

As a general rule of thumb, the longer the extraction process, the coarser your grind should be and vice versa; otherwise it’s going to be bitter. If you’re using an espresso machine, the extraction time is going to be pretty short, hence why it’s best to use a fine grind. The complete opposite is true for the pour over method, because the extraction time is relatively long, you’ll want to switch up the grind to a sand-like particle size. The best way to know if you’re doing it right is to check your timing…

3. Timing

In simple terms, each brew method has an ideal extraction time i.e. the amount of time water should make contact with the coffee. For an espresso, the extraction time may be 25 seconds whereas with a pour over it could be over 2 minutes. Once you’ve figured out what brew recipe you want to follow – adjust your grind size until you achieve the brew time specified. For example, if your recipe states that your pour over should be done in 2 minutes, but it’s taking 3 minutes, that means your grind size is too fine, make it coarser and try again; keep doing this until it hits the mark.

4. Rinse Your Filter & Use Filtered Water

This is a simple one – when brewing your coffee you want to enjoy the flavour the coffee brings and eliminate contaminating factors. New filter paper brings a paper-like taste with it, so rinse it thoroughly & use filtered water where possible.

5. Use Fresh Coffee

The most obvious and most important of all. Stale beans makes for stale coffee; fresh beans makes awesome coffee. A simple rule of thumb? Small batch roasters = good; supermarket coffee = crap.

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