Better coffee. One cup at a time.

Tag: manual coffee brewing

How to Use Coffee Recipes to Brew Better Coffee

In the last couple years, I have been writing considerably less on the blog. I have, however, still been brewing copious amounts of coffee. I’ve done some traveling and explored new coffee products during my intermission. These experiences have made me more keenly aware of a coffee brewing truth that impacts everyone who crowdsources their coffee information: Everyone’s brewing set-up has different variables and thus you should approach coffee recipes with a bit of skepticism. 

What is a Coffee Recipe?

Some of you are scratching your heads right now trying to figure out why you would need a recipe for brewing coffee beyond ground coffee beans plus water equals happiness

For the purpose of this post, a coffee recipe is going to be defined as detailed instructions on making a cup of coffee with a particular brewing method. This may be more specific and include a particular coffee from a particular roaster or more general and just talk about the brewing method itself.

Coffee recipes generally include a grind size (fine, medium, coarse), coffee dosage, brewing time and other techniques such as stirring or number of pouring pulses. 

Why Coffee Recipes Don’t Always Translate Well

Two products come to mind that show just how large the gap between nearly identical brewing set-ups can be. A few small differences may seem insignificant but they really can drastically change the results of a meticulously followed coffee recipe. 

Those products are Third Wave Water and the Kruve Sifter. While this post isn’t about the products in detail and reviews of them, here is what I learned from simply tinkering with them for a few years. 

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What I Discovered From a Month of Manual Coffee Brewing

The 31 days of my Brewing Coffee Manually Challenge have come and gone without incident or significant excitement on the coffee front. There were a few introspective early morning brew sessions and times when I thoroughly enjoyed (and abused) my .5 square feet of extra counter space. Many cups of outstanding coffee were had and, overall, I’d say the exercise was a smashing success.

When the smoke had cleared a bit and my filters were restocked, I sat down and tried to dissect what I could take away from it all. Here are a few things I learned by giving up my automatic coffee maker for a month:

I don’t need an automatic coffee maker for day-to-day operations

I will go even further and say, “At this point, I don’t want an automatic coffee maker for my day-to-day operations.” I found that I look forward to brewing my coffee manually in the morning (even really early) and realized how much I dreaded prepping my coffee the night before.

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