Tips and Tricks To Improve Your Brew

Manipulating the following variables will affect your end cup no matter what brew method you use. Depending on your equipment at home, some of these variables may be automatized or fixed already.

Like any experiment, it’s best to only change one variable at a time and fix the other variables. Play with the different variables below to get more or less extracted into your cup, or to the desired flavours that you want to taste.

Water:

What minerals and compounds are in it will impact what coffee compounds bind to the water and extract, and at what rate. We recommend using filtered water if possible to prevent chlorine or other undesirable flavours from impacting the final cup.

Grind size:

A fine grind will cause coffee to extract at higher rates and a coarser grind will extract at slower rates.

Grind quality:

An even particle size of ground coffee promotes a more even extraction. Like chopping an onion into wildly different sized chunks will cook at different rates on a frying pan, ground coffee particles in a coffee bed being brewed will extract at different rates. We recommend using burr grinders. They grind coffee into more consistent particles than propeller/blade grinders.

Temperature:

We use brewing water that is 95 degrees celcius or 203 degrees fahrenheit. A simple trick if you don't have a thermometer to measure your brew water is to pull your kettle off boil and wait 8 seconds before you use this water.

Equipment:

Keeping your brewing equipment clean will preserve the flavour.

Agitation:

High pressure like the kind produced by an espresso machine, or stirring your coffee slurry if using a pour-over method, will accelerate extraction.

Time:

Ground coffee in contact with hot water for a longer period of time will accelerate extraction. A shorter time will decrease and shorten extraction. Think of a tea bag, and how when you let it sit in your mug for a long time, it gets too strong. It’s the same with coffee.

Dose:

Different brew methods require different ranges of coffee used to brewing water used. Generally, filter coffee methods are a 1:15-1:16 ratio of coffee to water, and espresso is 1:2.