Artisan roasting of premium coffee beans is only one component of a great cup of coffee. If it’s not properly prepared however, you might as well be drinking Folgers!

Here’s How to Make a Good Cup of Coffee circa 1961

There are many different ways to brew coffee, but the final results can fluctuate wildly! Your personal taste preferences will determine what method best suits you but here are the six recognized brewing methods:

Drip Filtration

The way Americans are usually introduced to coffee. Hot water is poured over coffee grounds and filtered through a medium like a paper filter to prevent coffee grounds from entering the cup. Ideal grind for drip method is medium for most automatic brewers and a brew temperature of between 195 and 205 degrees. We will carry Technivorm drip brewers from the Netherlands, recognized as the best drip brewer on the market.

Percolation

If you ever wondered why church coffee often tastes so nasty, it’s because it’s often brewed in a percolator. Percolators use pressure from steam to force water through the grounds. Because the water brews at boiling temperature, and then keeps the brewed coffee at that temperature, many of the good flavor characteristics are destroyed, and the coffee often ends up tasting burnt. The best grind for a percolator is course. Needless to say, we won’t be carrying any percolators.

Steeping/French Press

By infusing the coffee, this brewing method produces a cup that is usually more flavorful than the drip method. The reason is simple: water is exposed to the ground coffee for a longer period of time resulting in greater concentration of hard-to-extract flavors. The ideal grind is course. We will carry French Presses from Bodum of Germany. Also, we will use French presses for cupping sessions and coffee sampling.

Vacuum Filtration

My personal favorite, vacuum brewing produces a well-balanced cup, that’s smooth and flavorful, and it’s entertaining to boot! The upper chamber of the brewer appears to suck the coffee into suspended gravity in the upper chamber of grounds for the brew cycle until the vacuum is released, at which point the brew returns to the lower chamber. The ideal grind for a vacuum brewer is course. We will carry the Cona vacuum brewer made in the U.K. and the Bodum Santos from Germany.

Decoction

This is a real fancy way of saying that the grounds and water are mixed up together in the pot and boiled. It sounds more scientific than “Cowboy Coffee” or “Turkish Coffee”, but that’s what it means.

With Cowboy Coffee the mixture is boiled and then left to cool and settle for several minutes to allow the grounds to sink to the bottom. Then, the coffee is poured off the top into a metal cup or something rustic. (This makes it feel more authentic! If you’re out in the woods around a campfire, that helps too!) Otherwise, it’s not the greatest tasting method. The ideal grind is fine.

The Turkish method is a more elegant, practically ritualistic process that involves boiling the mixture in an Ibrik several times along with sugar and other spices like Cardamon. It really begins by pulverizing the coffee into a fine powder – even finer than an espresso grind. After the unusual boiling process a thick, sweet liquid is created, along with a delicious foam. A perfectly prepared Turkish coffee has virtually no suspended particulate matter, but usually there are some particles of coffee powder remaining in the brew.

Pressurized Infusion

Ie: Espresso. There are a few different ways espresso can be prepared. The one thing they all have in common is that they require a very fine grind….hence the term Espresso grind. Most common to Americans is the electric espresso machine they’re used to seeing in Starbucks or their favorite coffee shop. Espresso machines use pressure to force the water through the finely ground, usually dark roasted grounds. This extracts the ultimate flavor from the coffee and a wonderful crema is created on top of the perfectly layered shot. Initially, we will not be offering electric espresso machines for sale, but plan on adding them to our inventory in Q4 – 2009.

Espresso can also be prepared using a stove-top espresso maker that utilizes two internal chambers to use steam pressure to force near boiling water through the grounds. It produces a good quality espresso, but is somewhat different from shots pulled from an electric machine. Some Europeans feel this is a more authentic espresso preparation method. We will carry stove-top espresso makers from Bialetti and Bodum.

Lastly, there is a different variation of the pressurized infusion method that I have become very fond of. I will write more about it later as it produces a cup of coffee that is the equal to the $10,000 Clover coffee maker, but we’ll sell it for about $30 at Blacksmith Coffee Roastery and on BlacksmithCoffee.com.

In other news…..

One of the roasters shipped today and I should have it by the end of the week. Hip hip hooray!