Brewing Coffee Manually

Better coffee. One cup at a time.

Year: 2014 (Page 2 of 3)

How to Choose A Coffee Scale (And Why You Should Add A Scale To Your Brewing Arsenal)

December 12, 2014 / / 0 Comments

I am a numbers kind of guy. I like to keep records, measure and tweak things. Procedural inconsistencies, especially when it comes to coffee brewing, bother me. I like to have processes in place that help me to consistently produce the same cup of coffee (And then incrementally change things to improve that cup of coffee). Besides upgrading to a quality burr grinder, using a digital coffee scale when brewing is one of the best ways to keep some key variables consistent.

I know that there are some free spirit coffee brewers out there that don’t want to shackle themselves to an experience that is more like a science experiment than their usual calming manual coffee brewing ritual. I’m okay with that. If you want to keep your brewing process organic and free from measuring and controlling all the details, a digital coffee scale might not be for you. For the rest of us, a coffee scale is an inexpensive addition to your brewing gear that can really help you dial in your ratios and processes.

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Butter in coffee

Putting Butter in Coffee- The Tasting Results Are in!

November 25, 2014 / / 1 Comment

It is Thanksgiving week and I thought I would take a break from some general coffee topics and do something that is fun, trending, and well… possibly unhealthy. Butter is something that is a Thanksgiving staple at most feasts and, with the recent trend of people adding it to their coffee, I thought it was time to test a butter in coffee recipe.

Butter and Coffee-Background Information

A major cause of the recent popularity of butter in coffee is the founder of the website Bulletproof Executive, David Asprey. While traveling in Tibet, David was invigorated by a cup of tea with yak butter in it. From that experience, he came up with a recipe for Bulletproof coffee which contains, among other things, 1-2 tablespoons of grass-fed, unsalted butter.

Butter in coffee is supposably giving people a quick and easy breakfast alternative that provides six hours of energy. It does not sound like a good idea to consistently consume 2 extra tablespoons of butter for breakfast every morning and I personally will not be doing this. There is a good article on Healthline that discusses some reasons why putting butter in your coffee may be a bad idea.

But what does it taste like? I am a believer in the old adage that everything tastes better with butter. How could coffee be the exception? I drink my coffee black, but the prospect of putting butter in a cup of coffee is too intriguing to pass up.

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Choosing a coffee grinder

The Best Coffee Grinder-How to Choose?

November 19, 2014 / / 4 Comments

Grinding your own coffee at home can dramatically increase the your brewed coffee quality. Coffee loses it’s freshness much faster in ground form over whole bean form. If you are looking to increase your cup quality and you are not grinding your own coffee, buying the right coffee grinder will give you some serious bang for your buck.

There are two basic types of coffee grinders you can purchase. The first is a standard blade type grinder (think Magic Bullet). The second type is what is known as a burr grinder. These two types of grinders have totally different ways of grinding coffee and thus have different results.

The importance of particle size and consistency

Before I break down the two types of grinders and make a few recommendations, I would like to talk about particle size and consistency . Particle size as It relates to coffee is how coarse or fine you grind your coffee. Based on your brewing method, you may want a larger particle size (for an immersion brewing technique like French Press brewing) or smaller particle size (Like for espresso).

One of the most important elements with particle size is consistency. You want to have all the particles to be roughly the same size. You do not want some really big chunks and some fine powdery chunks in your grind.

If you have an inconsistent grind, you will have an inconsistent cup of coffee. You will not get all the flavors you want out of the big chunks of coffee and the powdery coffee dust will be over extracted. The result will be flavors you do not want in your cup. Particle size and consistency are very important for cup quality.

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