Time Your Grind

Timing is everything… and the timing of when you grind your coffee beans matters. I’ve briefly mentioned it before, but there is a huge difference in the taste of brewed coffee when you brew within 60 seconds of grinding vs. brewing coffee with beans you ground the night before while setting up the coffee machine before bed (or worse, preground coffee). Here’s why…

The thing that makes coffee taste so good are the coffee oils found inside the coffee beans. During the coffee roasting process, sugars are caramelized and oils are formed and trapped inside the bean, encapsulated and protected from the outside world for a very short period of time. These coffee oils are essentially what gives brewed coffee its great taste.

In a perfect world, these oils would just hang out inside the bean indefinitely, but there are 2 forces working against these oils: carbon dioxide and oxygen. These two goons have a special assignment: destroy the coffee oils within 10 days, and if we let them, they’ll do just that – every time.

Let’s take carbon dioxide. One result of the coffee roasting process is that carbon dioxide is emitted from a freshly roasted coffee bean for about 2 weeks. The CO2 is the result of the volatile roasting process… think of it like a Pepsi can shaken up. It takes a little while for the Pepsi to normalize and the pressure to subside. Same thing with fresh roasted coffee – the coffee bean is in a volatile state and over the course of 10 days or so, the carbon dioxide slowly pushes the trapped coffee oils hiding inside the bean out to the surface, the oils escaping through cracks and crevices found throughout the interior and surface of the bean. The cracks are too small for oxygen to enter, so the carbon dioxide does the dirty work by forcing the oils out.

Now that the coffee oils are exposed on the surface of the bean, the second force – oxygen – takes over by attacking the oils and in a very small amount of time (30-60 minutes) the oils become rancid and if the beans are used, the resulting coffee will taste very stale and bitter.

With that background, it’s easy to see how ground coffee creates so much more surface area for oxygen to come in and do its thing. And not only do you have 30-60 minutes to brew your coffee after grinding, but 80% of any carbon dioxide left inside the coffee beans dissipate into the atmosphere within 60 seconds of grinding! CO2 is the main transport mechanism for pushing out any oils inside the bean casing into the water when we brew, so we really need to do what we can (brew quickly after grinding!) to use it to our advantage to get those oils out.

Try brewing within 60 seconds of grinding your coffee beans and I bet you’ll make a better tasting cup of coffee.

Rinse Your Coffee Filter to Remove Paper Taste

You may not realize it, but the paper filters we use when brewing coffee in a drip-brewer or coffee dripper have a taste. A pretty disgusting taste, actually… like chewing on newspaper. Paper filters have soluble solids in them which are extracted during the brew process and this papery taste makes it into your cup. We’re so used to the taste that we don’t even notice it in our coffee anymore. But, if this filter taste was removed, we would notice the lack of paper taste in our brew, and we could get that much closer to attaining the perfect cup of coffee.

This can be done very easily! The best way, if using a drip-brew machine, is to place your filter in the coffeemaker (don’t add any coffee grounds yet!), add some water to the machine and start the brew cycle. You can use a small amount of water, about half a cup to a cup should do. The goal is to get some very hot water running through the filter to remove the paper taste. Dump the water after it cycles and start brewing your coffee like normal.

If you’re brewing with a manual pour-over dripper such as the Clever Coffee Dripper, just place the paper filter inside the dripper, place the dripper on top of your mug, and in a circular motion, pour water over the filter so that the entire thing gets wet. It doesn’t take much, and the quality of the pour matters much more than the quantity of water used. Cold water doesn’t work very well because the filter’s soluble solids (fibers, etc.), much like ground coffee beans, have a quicker extraction time the hotter the water is (that’s why french press with hot water takes 4 minutes and cold brewing takes 8-12 hours)… so, near-boiling water works best.

I typically use a coffee dripper when making coffee and when I pour hot water onto the filter, I can clearly see that the water that drips into my mug has a yellow tint and tastes very papery! Sometimes I forget to rinse the filter, especially if I’m half asleep… but, when I make a second cup, I taste a big difference when rinsing the filter. Try this for yourself. Make a cup of coffee the usual way. Then, do the rinse and make note of the yellow tint in the water. Take a small sip (gag!) and make note of what you taste. This is what cuppers (professional coffee tasters) do. They taste the good and the bad so they have experience and descriptors to use when saying why a coffee tastes good or bad. I bet if you use this rinsing technique you’ll taste a big difference in your coffee you brew at home.

One last note – in our last blog post, we discussed the importance of preheating your mug for better tasting coffee. This post ties in, as you can actually knock out both rinsing your filter and preheating your mug at the same time in most cases! The rinsed water is what would stay in your mug, keeping it hot, until you’re ready to dump it out and pour in a fresh brew.

Leveraging the Pause and Serve for Better Coffee

Although I’m partial to making coffee in a french press or a pour over cone dripper, many people still use regular old drip coffee brewers. And that’s OK. Maybe you don’t like the amount of sediment you get in your cup from using a french press (grind coarser, ::ahem::). Maybe the thought of brewing 1 cup at a time using a cone dripper seems like too much of a hassle, especially if you need to brew more than 1 cup of coffee at a time.

Perhaps you’re just not ready to move to the next level of your coffee journey just yet. Whatever the case may be, drip brewers are still one of the most common ways of brewing coffee in most people’s homes. I’m not a big fan, since optimal coffee extraction really happens around 195-205 degrees and drip brewers can typically only get up to about 190.

Still, there’s a simple hack you can use to make your drip brewed coffee taste better by leveraging the pause and serve feature (if your brewer has one… many do!).

The pause and serve is a feature introduced back in ’86 by Mr. Coffee drip coffee brewers where, while your coffee is brewing, it allows you to sneak a quick cup before the entire brewing process is complete by stopping the dripping of coffee for up to about a minute when the carafe is removed mid-brew. After pouring yourself a cup, and replacing the carafe back on top of the warming plate, the drip begins again.

The hack is simple… the filter basket, carrying the ground coffee, gets a continual showering of hot water, but never gets fully submerged with water such as in a french press. We’re going to change that. Wait about a minute after starting the brew process and pull the carafe out of the coffee maker, not to sneak a cup, but rather to allow that filter basket to fill up with hot water. Wait a good 45 seconds, then return the carafe to the warming plate… let the brewed coffee filter in to the carafe and give it about 30 seconds to “catch up”. Repeat 2-3 more times.

By doing this, you’re in effect making that filter basket fill up with hot water so the coffee grounds can steep, fully submerged, much like a french press. I think you’ll be really surprised by the results… you should notice a bigger body and richer flavor. Give it a shot and let me know in the comments if you tried this and how the resulting coffee tasted. Ken