Tips for Making Coffee at Home

It appears to be a difficult endeavor to create the ideal cup of coffee at home. You may occasionally enjoy a cup of coffee, but other times you may be left wondering what went wrong. However, making coffee at home doesn’t have to be complicated, and with the appropriate methods, it can taste just as good as the coffee served in our cafes. There are a few tricks and techniques that might help you make the perfect cup of coffee at home every time. Simple adjustments to the way you prepare your coffee can have a huge impact.

Home Coffee Making Essentials

Of course, if you want to make coffee at home, you’re going to need a few things. For obvious reasons, unless you’d prefer to skip the whole coffee making experience and just opt for a pre-packed coffee sachet where you just add hot water and stir, you simply can’t create the ideal cup of coffee without having the following. Additionally, having a few of the following essentials is just good practice and makes practical and perfect sense.

Coffee Bean

  • Whole Coffee Beans – Well, this is a no-brainer. In order to make coffee, you’re going to need coffee beans. Use freshly roasted, premium coffee beans if you want a great cup of coffee every time. One of the most important things is to stay within your limits, so avoid buying expensive coffee. 

Coffee Beans in a Glass Canister

  • Airtight Canister – You’re going to need to store your coffee beans somewhere and an important coffee making essential, second to the coffee grinder, is an airtight canister. Yes, don’t use just any container. You need to use an airtight container and place it in a cool dry place away from sunlight.

Piece of butter on kitchen scale

  • Digital Food Scale – You can get a sufficient serving of coffee by eyeballing or scooping the quantity into the cup. However, it is advisable to use a measuring scale to get the proper amount.

Vintage handmade wooden coffee grinder

  • Coffee Grinder – It’s important to use the correct coffee grinder to ground the coffee beans. The ideal investment will be a burr grinder if you want to make barista-quality coffee at home. Although pricey, you will always get the best cup of coffee with it. However, a manual hand mill will work just as well and provide a consistent, nice grind if you cannot afford a burr grinder.

How to make coffee 14: Heat water to 90 degrees Celsius

  • Coffee Thermometer – The temperature of the water affects the taste of your coffee. The bitter components in the coffee will be extracted if the water is excessively hot. Additionally, keeping coffee on a warming plate for an extended period of time or reheating it can make even the finest coffee taste bad and bitter.

Modern espresso coffee machine with a cup in interior of kitchen closeup

  • Coffee Maker – You will, however, need a different type of coffee maker depending on your brewing method. But there are several coffee makers in the market that gets the job done, and you may opt for Mega Cocina’s electric coffee maker. Those who require more than one cup of coffee at once are taken into account by Mega Cocina. This espresso coffee machine may be a better choice than the single-serve one if you need to brew two or three cups all at once. This espresso maker will look fantastic on your counter and provide you with a convenient experience thanks to its trendy black base and adjustable capacity of 1.5 to 3 cups. Since this carafe is cordless, using it to serve breakfast or to catch up with friends at home is simple. You can always count on a safe and comfortable use with the cool touch handle.

Tips for Making Coffee at Home

Making great coffee at home is more of a journey than a destination, whether you’re attempting to shift away from acidic, burnt drip coffee or trying to duplicate your favorite coffeehouse specialties. You just need to determine what “better” means to you as the first step on that path. There isn’t just one coffee that is the best. Simply the best version of what you love exists. Once you’ve decided on a course of action and have identified something you enjoy, you may start to make improvements to it until you find a cup of coffee that surpasses all the neighborhood coffee shop has to offer. And a few tips and techniques never hurt anyone.

  • Use fresh, whole coffee bean – Aromatic chemicals found in roasted coffee beans play a significant role in why coffee smells and tastes so gloriously complex. Following roasting, a process known as degassing causes these molecules to start escaping from the bean, carrying a lot of flavor with them. Up to 70% of such chemicals will have disappeared within 8 days. More flavor is lost over time, leaving you with stale-tasting coffee. This procedure will be accelerated by grinding the coffee, which increases the surface area of the bean and facilitates the chemicals’ easier exit. You can get the most flavorful cup possible out of your coffee beans by using only fresh coffee and grinding just before brewing.
  • Store your coffee beans in an airtight canister – To keep coffee from losing flavor and becoming stale, it should be stored in an airtight container that is protected from sunlight. The deterioration accelerates and your coffee starts to lose flavor when it is exposed to oxygen. Beans should never be frozen or kept cold; always keep them at room temperature. Moreover, it’s best to purchase enough coffee for five to seven days.
  • Use a scale – The fundamental rule of using 2 teaspoons of coffee for every 6 ounces of water is known to many of us. And while you can undoubtedly make coffee using that recipe (or ones similar to it), they lack the accuracy you need to enhance your brewing. Because the size and density of different coffees and blends can vary greatly, a tablespoon of one coffee may actually weigh substantially less than a tablespoon of another. Using a scale enables you to measure by weight (instead of volume), ensuring that you always know how much coffee is going into your cup, regardless of the type of coffee you’re using.
  • Use the right amount of coffee – How strong or weak a cup of coffee will be depends on how much coffee you use in comparison to how much water you use. A stronger cup results from using more coffee, whereas a weaker cup results from using less. Use the “Golden Ratio,” which calls for mixing 1 gram of coffee with 18 grams of water. But it really depends on your personal preferences. Utilize the recommendations to determine your personal golden ratio based on taste and preference.
  • Use a burr grinder – One of the most essential equipment in the brewing of coffee is a great grinder. The rate at which flavors are extracted from coffee beans depends on the size of the ground coffee particles; smaller particles extract flavors more quickly than larger particles. To ensure that the coffee grounds brew at the same rate, you want your grounds to be approximately the same size. You have a lot more control over the brewing process if you can accurately control the size of your ground coffee. You can achieve this using burr grinders since they make it incredibly simple for you to consistently produce a very particular grind size.
  • Grind at the correct coarseness or fineness setting – To create excellent coffee, different brewing techniques require different grind sizes. But how can you tell if the size you’re using is the proper one? Time and flavor are two extremely simple indicators. For instance, if a coffee tastes very acidic and sour, the grind was likely too coarse, and if it tastes overly bitter, the ground was likely too fine. In general, French presses require a coarse grind, pour-overs and AeroPress call for a medium grind, while espresso calls for a fine grind. You can make great a great tasting cup of coffee at home by adjusting your grind setting according to the proper time and taste each brewing method requires for the best tasting coffee.
  • Use filtered water – You might be surprised to learn that around 98.5% of brewed coffee is simply water. Thus, a significant portion of the flavor of your brewed coffee is determined by the quality and flavor of the water. Your coffee will taste unpleasant if the water you’re using has an odd flavor or smell. One of the best things you can do for your morning cup is to use filtered water. In some places, tap water is suitable for brewing, but in the majority of places, you should use bottled water or water that has undergone home filtering. Even though distilled water is technically the purest, coffee does not need some minerality to brew correctly and taste great, so avoid using it if you’re using bottled water.
  • Make sure your water is the right temperature – The temperature of the water affects the taste of your coffee. The water you use to brew your coffee must be at the ideal temperature, which is between 195 and 205 degrees Fahrenheit, in order to extract the best flavors from it. The temperature influences what gets extracted as well as the speed of the extraction (colder water brews coffee more slowly than hotter water). Coffee brewed with water below 195 degrees Fahrenheit wouldn’t have as much of the delightful acidity and distinctive aromas we like in our coffees. On the other hand, water heated over 205 degrees Fahrenheit will cause far more bitter flavors to extract from the coffee. By using that sweet spot when brewing, we can bring out the complexity and sweetness of our coffees without over-extraction of bitter flavors.
  • Pre-heat or pre-wet everything – Prior to brewing your coffee, you should make sure that everything it will come into contact with is at or near the brewing temperature. If you don’t do this, the brewing apparatus will absorb heat from the water during the brewing process, drastically lowering the temperature of the water. Knowing how important correctly heated water is for your brew, you’ll want to avoid unnecessarily lowering the temperature of your water. In order to properly prepare your filter for brewing a pour over, soak it with hot water and let it drain before you begin. This not only heats the filter to the proper temperature but also removes a significant amount of the paper flavor that would otherwise wind up in your coffee.
  • Bloom your coffee – You might observe that the coffee grounds begin to bubble up when you first add water (this is especially noticeable with very fresh coffee). This phenomenon is called the bloom, and is caused by CO2 – a natural byproduct of the roasting process – being forcefully expelled from the coffee. The bloom stage of the brewing process is crucial because CO2 can ruin your brew by forcing water away from the ground coffee and preventing extraction. Prior to adding more water, wait for the coffee to bloom for around 30 seconds after adding a little amount of water at the start of the brewing process. When blooming, you often need twice as much water as you did when brewing the coffee (for instance, if you used 35 grams of coffee, you’d need to use 70 grams of water).
  • Fully saturate your coffee – Make sure all of the ground coffee is in contact with water for the same period of time when making coffee. And while it might appear that the coffee in your pour over or French press is fully saturated when you first add water, it’s not unusual to find pockets of dry coffee. The easiest approach to ensure that all of your coffee is saturated is to give it a quick stir after adding the water during the bloom process.

Coffee brewing is a challenging task, especially for beginners. By purchasing the proper tools and equipment and paying attention to little details, you may, however, make it simple. They can significantly affect your coffee routine and enable you to make barista-quality coffee at home.