Mastering the Art of Home Brewing: Tips from Chuck’s Roast
Brewing café-quality coffee at home is both an art and a science. With the right techniques and equipment, coffee lovers can elevate their home brewing game.
Choosing the Right Beans: As with cooking, quality ingredients matter. You can’t make a bad, stale, or poorly roasted coffee taste good. But, you can certainly ruin a good coffee by brewing it incorrectly. Start with a good coffee from reputable roaster and spend some time learning about the variables that impact a good cup of coffee.
Grinding for Success: You want to grind just before brewing but how fine or how coarse a grind size depends on your brewing method. Turkish Coffee, for example, you will require an extremely fine grind. For a flat bottom pour-over, you’ll need a bit coarser. Given there are numerous types of grinders and burr age can impact consistency, finding the right grind usually comes down to trail and error with the grinder that you own. If you brew a cup and the brew time seems short, your grind is probably too coarse and you’ll probably end up with a sour cup. If your brew time runs long, your grind is too fine and you’ll end up with a bitter cup most likely. There are suggested grind sizes in our brewing guidelines you can use as a starting point.
Water Quality and Temperature: It is generally a safe bet to start your brewing with water that is 200 degrees. Some coffee will extract better at 205 depending on the density of the bean how the coffee was processed. Water quality is an essential element of the process. Bad water in, bad coffee out. San Diego has notoriously bad tap water so at the very least, one should be using filtered water if the tap water is subpar. Water hardness (TDS) will have a big impact on your coffee drinking experience; usually between 30 and 100 TDS is a goal to shoot for with filtered coffee. Once you get into minimality coffee coffee, you’ll soon find yourself free falling into a rabbit hole of research and opinions so basic Reverse Osmosis water is usually your safest starting point if you are looking to upgrade your coffee experience. This doesn’t mean you need to install a whole system. I usually go to the local water store and fill up a 2 gallon container with RO water that i dedicate for brewed coffee only. This minor inconvenience pays off; not only will you have vastly improved coffee, but the RO water will add years to your brewing equipment if you are using an espresso machine or brewer.
With practice and attention to detail, anyone can master the art of home brewing and enjoy exceptional coffee daily.