Commodore Joe Redcloud© wrote:

On Wed, 21 Dec 2005 10:50:50 -0500, Jerry Avins wrote:


Commodore Joe Redcloud wrote:

On Tue, 20 Dec 2005 17:36:18 -0500, Jerry Avins wrote:



John McGaw wrote:



If you want good coffee and are willing to do a minimum of work for it
then you would be better off with a cone-type maker with a gold-metal
filter (rather than the disposable paper) or a French-press which is my
personal favorite. And for a step up you could start buying top-quality
beans and grinding them fresh before each use, make sure that your water
is perfect, using a fixed brewing time of 4 minutes and adjust the
amount of grounds to get the proper strength, and controlling the
temperature at which the water makes contact with the grounds (204-208F
is optimum).

And yes, before you ask, I _am_ something of a coffee snob...

That's as may be, but I think I out-snob you. First, I hope those
tablespoons were at least heaping. I use an ounce by weight for five
coffee cups. (A cup is eight ounces, but the "cup" marks on coffee
brewers are about six. If my coffee were ground coarsely enough to use
with fine mesh filters, I would need more yet. Paper filters let me get
more flavor grim the same beans by grinding them finer.

Jerry


If you aren't roasting your own beans as needed, you really aren't much of a
snob at all.

Coffee brewers? Oh BOY! They don't get the water hot enough to make coffee.

Dunno what you use for drip machines, but I've owned several of
different makes. They have all produced coffee that was *almost*
boiling. Make excellent coffee, too. The only better coffee I've ever
had was jug brewed by my dear departed father.


You
are drinking hot brown water. If you are settled on drip, get yourself a chemex.
You'll have to boil the water separately, but the difference in the results is
enormous. It's really pretty hard to top a french press for the best all around
cup of coffee. It requires a bit more attention to get it right, though.

There are a few erroneous assumptions above. Here's what I do:

Boil water in the whistling kettle.


Good so far..


Grind roasted beans (stored in the freezer),


This can be very bad for a host of reasons. Carefully packaged coffee
can be frozen for long term storage in a deep freezer, but if you
access the coffee often, or even open the freezer daily it is often
worse for the beans than storing it at room temperature.

Depends what they are in in the freezer... Ours live in airtight tubs.
Opening the freezer doesn't affect them at all.


using a rotary mill, not
whirling blades. The resulting grind is fine, but uniform.


That's better!


Brew with a cone filter. When my last Tricolator breaks, I'll have to
switch to Mellita. There's an art to pouring, but that's another tale.



That's fine, too. My assumption above was that when someone refers to
a "coffee brewer", and then talks about "cup" marks, I assume they are
talking about a typical automatic drip machine, not something like a
Chemex.



Commodore Joe Redcloud©


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