You can buy great coffee, store it correctly, roast to perfection and still end up with a cup of coffee that is not to your liking. How is that? It has to do with the quality of the water that you use and how you filter your coffee. Using bottled or filtered water will generally take care of the water quality issue. But how to filter your coffee can be a more involved issue. What kind of filter you use determines if you remove oils that provide flavor but also may create health issues.
Optimal Coffee Brewing Temperature
To get the best aroma and flavor you should be buying arabica coffee from places like Colombia. Store correctly and only grind enough coffee for what you will brew. Water temperature is important as water that is too cool will not extract the flavors of your coffee. Water that is too hot will destroy some of those flavors. The ideal brewing temperature is between eighty-two and ninety-two degree Celsius which is one hundred eighty degrees to one hundred ninety-seven degrees Fahrenheit. For pour over coffee boil the water and let stand until the temperature falls sufficiently.
Why Filter Your Coffee?
Brewing coffee is based on pour over, immersion, pressure, or a combination of these. A good reason to filter your coffee is that you then remove both cafestol and kahweol coffee oils. These are diterpene compounds that can raise your cholesterol. Filtered coffee generally contains about one part in thirty of these compounds compared to unfiltered coffee. Using a simple cloth filter for pour over coffee eliminates any hit of paper taste from that kind of filter and lets more oils through for more flavor. More complicated metal and plastic filters are generally designed to get the coffee away from the grounds quickly to avoid over brewing. Paper filters are handy because they can be easily disposed of along with the used grounds. They are also the most effective for screening out all of the grounds as well as a majority of oils.
Filtering Coffee With a French Press
If you want more of the taste and aroma that comes with not removing so much of the oils and grounds from your coffee you probably want to use a French press. With this method make sure that you only use a coarse grind and a pot that exactly fits the amount of coffee that you are going to brew. Ideally preheat your pot and add only about a sixth of the water and your ground coffee. Stir for about fifteen seconds and then add the rest of your water. The wait four minutes as the coffee extracts into the water before pushing down on the plunger of the French press. To avoid over extraction pour your coffee immediately and enjoy.
Paper Coffee Filters
This is the idea way to avoid having too much oil with your coffee as well as unwanted grounds. Coffee filters are convenient but make sure you use the right size for your brewing method. Ideally soak your filter in boiling water and discard excess liquid before using it to filter your coffee. For the pour over method use two tsp of grounds and place in the filter before pouring the water. Do so slowly, for thirty seconds. For coffee percolators follow the direction on the packaging for amount of coffee grounds and water.