T. Ryan Rogers - Kicking my home coffee up several notches with only one notch of effort

2021-10-20

Kicking my home coffee up several notches with only one notch of effort

I didn't start drinking coffee at all until mid-way through grad school. Up to that point in my life, I simply could distinguish the different flavors that (any decent) coffee (genuinely) contains. When I first started drinking coffee, I had no clue how to make it. Fortunately, it was super easy, and several coffee drinker friends gave me the rule of thumb, "1 tablespoon of coffee grounds per 1 cup of water." I used this rule of thumb for the greater part of 4 years before my brother-- who was a barista (baristo? bro-ista?) and has a doctorate (in pharmacy, which I feel is distantly related to brewing)-- showed me the light.

Let's set some ground rules before we go further:

I'm going to keep using my $8.00 Wal-Mart coffee maker. Don't try to sell me on anything I don't already own.
I'm going to keep drinking black coffee. Keep it real.
I'm not going to spend any time roasting or grinding my own beans.
The improvement in taste must be worth any additional effort.
Don't push it with the "extra effort." It takes me only a couple minutes to make coffee with the above rule of thumb, and I won't bother with anything that takes significantly longer.
If this requires me to go hipster, forget it.

With these rules in play, how is one to make coffee?

1 tablespoon of grounds per cup of water is wrong.

"But that's just your opinion!"

"There's no 'right' or 'wrong' way to make coffee!"

Whatever, dude. Keep drinking your lackluster, inconsistent coffee. The rest of you, keep reading.

There is a better way.

There are a few problems with the above rule of thumb. First, coffee ground can get clumped together, or you can unintentionally pack them denser in every scoop. Measuring grounds by volume always risks the density problem. Secondly, who's "cup" are you measuring water with? The graduations on the coffee pot? On the brewer's reservoir? Not to worry, that's way too much water anyway.

The following is not a lie. The following is not a paid advertisement. These golden rules produced instantly better tasting and more consistent coffee for me:

Weigh your coffee grounds and water. Use a 1:{16-20} ratio of grounds:water. I use 1:18 grams per grams, and it works great. (A food scale is literally a <$10.00, one-time purchase, and you'll use it for other things too. Pony up.) Another benefit is that it doesn't matter if your scoops are exactly a tablespoon since you don't care about volume anymore. Alternatively, you can work backwards to the weight of grounds needed if you want to brew a specific volume of coffee.
Use the hottest water you can get from your tap. From this <2 min. video on how my $8.00 coffee maker works, I reason that pre-heated water will help ensure a more uniform boil in the reservoir (whether or not this poses any problem), and also ensure that the liquid water being carried to the grounds to actually perform the brewing is hot water (which is clearly desirable).
When the reservoir is 75-90% emptied, open the brewer lid (avoid steam to the face), stir the coffee grounds, and then re-close the lid to finish the brewing. The goal of this step is to make better use of the grounds, as the cheap makers have a tendency to blast the center of the pile of grounds, causing a cone-shaped depression and unused grounds near the sides of the filter paper. If you do this step right, you should have a level puck of coffee grounds at the end (no cone-shaped depression).

These rules were a total game-changer for me. And now I've shared them with you.

You're welcome.

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