Back to the Ol' Grind

Did you miss me?

(Don’t answer that.) 

At any rate, the blog is back in action this week with a quick word about grinding your coffee just right for the best cup. After all, since it’s Valentine’s week, you’ll certainly be bringing your sweetheart (or your mom, dad, sister, roomie...) breakfast in bed…which absolutely should include a steamy cup of delicious HG coffee.

If you came here straight from this week's coffee bar newsletter, welcome! Thanks for stopping by.

Every brewing method has a particular extraction time, which means how long the coffee & the water hang out together. A French press relies on a long extraction (3-4 minutes), so it's good to use coarsely ground coffee. The shorter the extraction time, the finer the grind—as you might expect, espresso has a short extraction (about 25 seconds), so a very fine grind is used.

During any brewing, most of the flavors you want from coffee are extracted first, along with caffeine. But when the time that the coffee & water are in contact is extended too long for the particle size, other things get extracted as well--sometimes bitter compounds we don't want, resulting in a less-than-ideal cup. And if your coffee is ground too coarsely, only a small amount of the desirable compounds will make their way into the result, leaving the good flavors back with the spent grounds & leaving you with an under-extracted cup of coffee. Be not led astray, friends: under-extracted isn’t the same thing as weak.

So why do I end up with a weak cup? you might ask. You’re probably not using enough coffee. Remember, you should use two tablespoons of grounds per 6-8 ounces of water, which amounts to just over a cup of grounds for an 8-cup coffee pot. (Also, your personal “cup” of coffee might be larger than an actual eight-ounce cup – keep that in mind when using brewpots without measure markers.) So if you know you’re using good, fresh beans (hopefully you got them recently from Higher Grounds!), & you know you’re grinding to the appropriate particle size, simply adjust your proportion. If your result seems bitter, adjust your grind to be a little coarser.

Finally, you’re always welcome to stop by HG & ask us in person. We’d love to help you achieve delicious, perfectly-extracted coffee at home.

Next week, we'll hear from Emma (HG barista) about her recent trip to Guatemala.

--Jennifer