Making and drinking good coffee is a fun ritual. It is fun to obsess over the methods of making good coffee – what matters and what doesn't matter. This became a long term home project after I stopped working full time in a biochemistry lab.
I roast
green coffee that I buy from Sweet Maria's. A lot of the fun is discovering which types of coffee you like. It takes a lot of trial & error, very much like tasting different wines or beers. I like Central Americans from Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Panama, and I like East Africans from Ethiopia and Kenya. The new Guats should be coming anytime soon.
To roast, I use a simple
Nesco electric roaster. It has a catalytic converter that removes much of the smoke. There are cheaper and more expensive roasters. It depends on how much you want to roast for about a week. I make 3 runs on the Nesco, starting with 120 grams of green coffee for each run and finish with about 105 g after roasting. Three runs gives me enough for a week. BSA's roaster can do bigger runs. There is nothing like drinking coffee about 3 days after it's roasted. By two weeks its getting stale and looses a lot of flavor. Local stores that sell 'fresh roasted' coffee never get it that fresh, they think 2 months is fresh.
And then there's the whole business about how light or dark do you like the roast. Much is said about this, but it's entirely personal preference. Experiment to find what you like. I like coffee roasted until the First Crack has ended, or just a minute longer.
I brew in a
large Technivorm electric drip pot. It has a potent 1400 watt heater that gets the water the right brewing temperature, about 200-205°F. That temperature is required for proper flavor extraction. Weaker heaters in cheaper drip pots can heat to about 175-195° and they create bitter tasting coffee. So people put in less ground coffee, making weaker bitter tasting coffee. A cheaper substitute for the Technivorm is to boil water in a kettle, and pour it over the grounds in larger filter cone, such as a
Melitta coffee maker. They come in various sizes.
I find it's better to use water filtered through an activated charcoal filter, like a Britta or other equivalent water filter. It removes the chlorine from the water, which I can taste in the brewed coffee. I never tried deionized or distilled water, and wonder if its any good.
I grind coffee in a
Barzata Virtuoso mill, suggested by BSA after my twirly blade grinder bit the dust. It works very well and is much easier to use than the old twirly blade grinder. A lot of voodoo is associated with types of grinders. A precise level of fine grind is important for making espresso, but for other types of brewed coffee, the grinder isn't so important.
I know nothing about making espresso, other than espresso people are obsessed to a degree that amazes me. Their grinders and espresso makers are all expensive, and require a long learning curve before the brew is wonderful. But if you pay $2,350 for a machine called a
Rocket Giotto Evoluzione v2 it looks badazz.
In contrast, drip coffee is much easier and cheaper.
