It’s Thursday morning, we are about two weeks into lockdown, and we are all going slightly crazy (as is evidenced by the drill we have attached to our hand coffee grinder). I’ve just made myself a delicious cup of filter coffee, and I wanted to share with you exactly how we have chosen to brew at home, at least for the time being, during the Coronavirus lockdown.
Before we get into the particulars, I wanted to acknowledge a couple of things: One, I, like most people and unlike most serious coffee ‘aficionados’, want a relatively quick, easy, clean and delicious cup of coffee in the morning. There is a whole host of equipment available; some cheap, some expensive, and a whole host of techniques; some easy, some complicated, and that’s for another time. Today we are going to focus on some fundamentals (that you may not have considered) that will transform your coffee at home, hopefully, take the labour out of the process, and ultimately reward you with exceptional coffee. Let’s get to it:
Equipment we are using
1. A kettle (boiling water)
2. Third Wave Water-mineralised water
3. Rocko Mountian, single-origin Ethiopian coffee (roasted by Strangers, Norwich)
4. A good quality grinder (a Comandante hand grinder in this case)
5. A drill (will explain later)
6. An OXO Good Grips Pour-over coffee maker with water tank
7. Some scales
Why have we chosen these bits of equipment?
The Kettle
Pretty simple - we need hot water. Note that we are not recommending one of those temperature programmable kettles or one with a gooseneck for that matter. A good old kettle that boils water will do just fine. In fact, unlike many coffee recipes we are asking that you use boiling water for this (not ninety-four degrees as most would call for), this is down to the OXO device and the fact that you lose heat pretty quickly during the brewing process.
Third Wave Water-mineralised water
Okay, I admit, this is pretty involved and geeky, but it is the thing combined with the coffee you choose, will make the most significant impact on the deliciousness of your final product.
So why does it matter? Well, coffee is mostly water, and what we are doing when we brew coffee is that we are using water (as a solvent) to form a solution with the coffee (the solute). We are creating a mixture of coffee and water in our cup, and this is what we drink. The reason that the chemical makeup of the water is so vital is because certain minerals in water make coffee taste good or bad. Standard water from the tap always falls short of the mark, and most water filter systems also struggle. The solution? Make your own water. The process is as follows:
1. Buy (or make) some de-ionised, or pure, or zero TDS water. We have historically used a company called ‘Pure Klenz’ to buy this water in five-litre batches. There is also a good water filter called ‘Zero water’- these guys make a water filter (much like Britta but with different technology) that you fill from the tap, and that gets your water pretty much pure.
2. Add one sachet of Third Wave Water pre-mixed minerals to 4.5 litres of pure water and shake it up.
Now you’re good to go!
We will be the first to say that this is quite a lot of groundwork for making coffee at home, but once you’ve done the water ‘bit’ everything else is easy.
It’s also worth mentioning that there are some water filters on the market that do an excellent job of producing decent coffee brewing water. The best is probably from Peak Water, followed by the Magnesium-adding filter from BWT. These both filter water directly from you tap (again, just like Britta but with different technology) ready for you to brew with straight away.
Well roasted coffee
This is where things get fun because you are free to choose and try coffee from all over the world. We suggest going to a reputable roaster that knows what they’re doing. They won’t roast the coffee too dark, nor too light. Their job is to try to get the coffee in your cup to express its distinctive natural and regional characteristics. There are many fantastic UK roasteries for you to try - here's some we work with:
1. Colonna Coffee
2. Strangers Coffee
3. Craft House Coffee
4. Round Hill Roastery
We can say that pretty much anything you pick from these guys will be high quality and roasted with skill and care.
A good grinder
Again, another great piece of kit. If you want to get the most out of your coffee (and if you are taking what we said about water and well-roasted coffee seriously), you will want to grind your coffee fresh. You can still get decent results with pre-ground coffee, but you’ll lose some of the aromatics and your coffee won’t s stay tasty for as long.
We use a hand grinder at homemade by a company called ‘Commandante.’ They make fantastic quality grinders, the likes of which compete with some extremely expensive commercial grinders. The only problem is that you need to grind by hand - or do you?
And here comes the drill...
The drill
What are the positives of using a high-quality hand grinder? You get a pretty much-unrivalled grind quality and consistency for the price. And the negatives? You spend a few minutes in the morning battling with a hand grinder.
So we bought a 5.5mm deep socket wrench, attached it to our drill (on impact driver setting) and transformed our brilliant hand grinder into the best value for money electric grinder on the market.
Note: this is not a recommendation, and we can’t take responsibility for any hand grinders ruined in the pursuit of stunning coffee.
The OXO Good Grips pour-over coffee maker
This is a great little device. It does the pouring-over for you, it’s clean, and it makes delicious coffee. Most importantly, it is straightforward to use. It's well made, and we found ours online for £13. We have two at home because it works best to use one per cup, rather than having to repeat the process if you want to make a second cuppa at the same time!
Scales
The last part of the puzzle - scales. Most coffee recipes you will read (or at least the ones worth reading) will involve weights. That is it will ask that you add several grams (g) of water to several grams (g) of ground coffee. You can make coffee well without scales, but volumetric recipes fall short for a few reasons: they’re imprecise, they don't take into account different bean densities, and they take longer to figure out how to get the best out of a given coffee (or dial-in the recipe and the jargon dictates).
For this particular recipe, it’s useful to know that 1ml of water weighs 1g, so when you come to use the OXO brewer, and you notice it has a volumetric scale on the side of the water tank, you can set up your two cups and pour up to (in our case) the 300ml mark on both tanks and know that you have pretty well-got 300g of water in each brewer.
So there you have it! What we are doing, right now, to make coffee at home. There is some groundwork to do, but once done, we are making delicious coffee at home, consistently and quickly.
We’ll happily share some more advice on specific brew methods and equipment in the future, particularly if you want to achieve the best set-up possible, but for now, we hope we can help steer you in the direction or great coffee at home!
Oh and here's the recipe/method we use:
1. Boil kettle
2. Put filter paper in brewing device (If you want to you can prewet the filter paper/brewer with hot water - we don’t)
3. Add 20g of ground coffee to brewer
4. Place brewer on mug
5. Place water tank on brewer
6. Add 300g of just-boiled water to the water tank (or fill to 300ml mark)
7. Place lid on the water tank
8. Wait for about 3 minutes - your coffee awaits!
coffee Equipment
Here’s a piture of the equipment we have been using to make filter coffee at home during the Coronavirus lockdown.