Coffee Snobbery

Some hobbies or passions require significant investments, and food is no exception. Many know of the $125 bottle of hot sauce I purchased and tried (the tale was chronicled in a previous version of this blog, though has since been purged), and my beer appreciation has led me to drop $130 on a bottle of beer (a subsequent blog post to come once I work up the courage to try it), but some don't require as much of an investment. Coffee is certainly a drink which can have its snobs, but I find it unique in that there's so many small things that can be done with your grounds to make incremental improvements and an increasingly better cup of joe.

I wasn't a big coffee drinker in college, mostly because we weren't allowed to have a maker until junior year, and I didn't really want to stink up a 12'x14' shared dorm room with coffee smell all day. Once I move to Del Rio, however, I thought I should sack up and take my coffee addiction to the next level (Diet Mountain Dew is a helluva drug). I started with an automatic drip coffee maker, the model of which was recommended by my BFF Alton Brown in his book as a maker which can get the water to a sufficient boil and brew for about five minutes - long enough to extract the good coffee flavors without extracting the very bitter stuff.

This may have been my first time around the block, but I wasn't naive enough to go for the pre-ground stuff. Coffee beans are a spice, and the longer you can wait until grinding, the better the product. Del Rio is not a city that has much of anything, coffee shops included, so I had to get my beans care of Starbucks vacuum-sealed packs from the grocery store and online if I didn't want the two types of roast that were available city-wide. Everyone shits on Starbucks for their crappy coffee, but I they start with a decent bean, roast them, and package them in a way that preserves freshness, so I didn't think it was the swill to which everyone equated it.

There's two ways to grind beans: blade grinders, which are cheap and small and use fast-spinning blades to chop the beans into grounds. There's also burr grinders, which use two rotating stones to grind the beans. I ground my own beans using a spice grinder and ground right before I made the coffee each morning.

The product was decent, and it got me through the last year and a half, but I've recently begun wanting more from a cup of coffee, so I started going down the list of potential coffee pitfalls and optimizing whatever I could:

The Water
The majority of coffee is water, so it should taste good. I use tap water that's been filtered through my Brita pitcher to ensure purity. The water needs to be hot to extract the coffee flavors, so I heat it to the boiling point with my electric kettle.

The Beans
Now that I live in a bigger city, I have more options in purchasing beans. You can get them from the giant bins at the specialty markets, but it's impossible to tell how long those beans have been sitting there (given the size of the barrels, I would wager 'quite a while'). Instead, I visit a local coffee shop that roasts their beans in-house. You don't necessarily have the same consistency in roasting quality as an industrial operation, but I've never had any problems. It's also nice to know that the beans that I'm buying were roasted within two or three days of purchasing, sometimes on the same day. I take them home and immediately seal them in an airtight container to preserve freshness.

The Grind
The problem with blade grinders is that they produce an inconsistent grind - some pieces are big and some small, resulting in overextraction of some of the grounds and underextraction of others. Burr grinders are more costly and use more counterspace, but I found a midrange grinder that gets the job done well. Professional burr grinders can go for hundreds of dollars, if you're into that sort of thing.

The Brew
Once the beans are ground and the water's hot, I put them together in my French press. The beauty of this device as opposed to other brewing methods is the controllability with regards to brew time. I place the grounds and water in the press (along with a pinch of salt to get rid of some of the bitterness, also recommended by AB), wait four minutes, and push.

How do you take your coffee? If it's anything other than black, you just lost a little of my respect.

The resulting product is definitely superior to the coffee my Brew Central was putting out. This cup has a cleaner appearance, less bitterness, and none of the occasional bits of grounds that sometimes managed to sneak through the drip. It even seems to wreak less havoc on my stomach, oddly enough. The pinnacle of coffee? Perhaps - I can't think of any other way to improve it.

It's typical that the simplest foods are often the ones that can be the most complex to make, and it's interesting to consider how many different elements - when chosen incorrectly - can cause a coffee catastrophe. I'm not saying this is how you should drink your coffee - drink your mud however you choose - but taking even one or two steps to improve something that is a daily ritual for many people can make a world of difference.