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Coffee is the chance not only to flood my veins with stimulating
caffeinoids, but also to lose myself in the nipple-hardeningly earthy taste
of a well-made cup of joe. I speak not of the latest coffee-flavored smoothie
from Starbucks, nor of a cup filled halfway with cream and sugar. Nay, it is
entirely possible to make a succulent, flavorful cup of pure black coffee.
How, you ask? Read on.
The beans are arguably the most important component of a good cup. Coffee
is made from ground coffee beans, usually imported from South America,
Africa, and Indonesia. Other regions also produce it, but blends from them
tend to be rather rare and expensive.
Coffee shops, supermarkets, and any other large-scale coffee distributors
rarely import coffee from a single plantation. Rather, each distributor
creates blends of coffees from several different sources, and sometimes even
from different regions. Unless one is buying ultrapremium Jamaican Blue
Mountain or Hawaiian Kona beans, one buys a particular blend, not a
particular kind of bean. Blends are described in stores by both their region
of origin, and their "character." You'll run into "bold,"
"mild," "smoky," "smooth," and a host of other
fairly self-explanatory terms for describing the particular taste of a
blend.
You'll need to drink a few pounds of different blends down before you
really start to develop an opinion on them, so let me make your first
decision for you. Walk into the nearest Peet's, and buy a half pound of Major
Dickason's blend. Like most Peet's coffee, it has a very smooth taste, and is
forgiving when it comes to bad coffee making technique. If no Peet's is
around, a Tully's or Starbucks will suffice, or if you have a local coffee
shop that does a lot of business, just get their house blend. I'm not sure
about the rest of the world, but the local coffee in San Francisco is pretty
good.
There's one more piece of knowledge you need before you walk into the
coffee shop, and that's the grind. Uh-oh, it's decision time.
Nothing beats grinding at home, right before brewing. You can grind whole
coffee beans in a cheap little electric grinder. Buying whole beans preserves
flavorful oils, releasing them into the cup as the coffee brews. However, if
you, like many, do get it ground at your place of purchase, make sure you
get the correct grind for your coffee-making appliance. Generally speaking,
paper filters (cone or machine) take the finest grind, gold or fabric filters
take a grind a bit coarser, and Italian bubblers and French presses take the
beans ground pretty coarse.
Oh, crap. More decisions to make? Yeah. While not perhaps making as much
difference in the taste of the coffee as the type of beans used, the device
one uses to make coffee can have a large effect on its taste.
Filter-based "machines."
These are either electric makers with a water reservoir and glass carafe,
or simple plastic cones placed over a cup (The simplest, cheapest way to make
a cup). Either way, ground coffee is placed in a cone-shaped filter, after
which hot water is poured over it. The water used should be just below
boiling. With paper filters, it's common to run cold water through the filter
before use, to remove any papery flavor.
Filter-based devices produce a uniform liquid with barely any residue.
The entire cup, top to bottom, is uniform and drinkable. Many people replace
the common paper filters with either fabric or gold mesh ones. Both are more
environmentally sound, but also a pain to wash. The gold ones leave a little
more oil in the finished product than other two, a nice subtle sheen on
the surface of the cup. They also tend to leave a tiny bit of residue on the
bottom, though not enough to make any of the cup undrinkable.
A filter maker has a few advantages over other systems. At it's simplest,
it is a plastic cone and a paper filter, easy to transport and wash (simply
throw out the filter), and requiring only hot water for use. Fine grinds are
the most common ones bought, so one can easily 'borrow' coffee when one
finds it. The big makers at your church, the YMCA-these often use filters.
Also, for storing in a thermos, one need not worry about the container's
orientation, since there's no residue to drift around. A cheap plastic-cone
filter system is a great way to get a start in beany caffeination.
Italian "bubblers"
No, Josh, this is not some sort of coffee bong. These devices are solid,
badass-looking hunks of metal, in my opinion the most passionate of the
coffee-makers. They have two roughly circular (octagonal, commonly) sections,
one atop the other, which typically unscrew from one another. The bottom
section is a cylindrical chamber, with a small hole in the side, and the
upper one resembles a teapot. The interior is a bit difficult to describe,
but the device works on the principle of evaporation. Ground coffee is placed
in a small, squat cylinder in the middle, which rests over the lower chamber.
The device is placed on a lit burner, water is placed into the bottom
section, and when it boils, it pushes upwards through the grounds and into
the top of the device, at which point the liquid condenses into the upper
chamber. The coffee can then be poured out a spout.
These Italian devices produce a single cup with both more flavor and more
residue than filter-based systems. There is visible oil on the top of the
cup, a bit of froth around the rim, and significant crud at the bottom. The
liquid produced is bold, unapologetic, the last eighth-quarter inch very
unpleasant-tasting. A coarser grind will reduce this residue some, but it
will also require more coffee for the same strength brew, and will never
completely eliminate grounds in the cup.
These are the most demanding of the coffeemakers. They are bothersome to
clean, as one has to wash three chambers, hard to transport (made out of
metal, they both stay untouchably hot after brewing, and are heavy), and
require the coarsest grind and the most precise measurement of grounds. Grind
your beans too fine, fill the chamber too full, or boil too long, and it will
come out in the coffee. Handle this raging bull of a coffeemaker, though,
and the results are excellent.
The Press
The third main coffeemaker is the French press, a device I was blessed
with this last Christmas, and the most elegant of coffee-preparation devices.
A gleaming metal frame encloses a glass cylinder, the lines of a domed top
sweeping down from a spherical plunger atop the whole apparatus. One lifts
the lid, puts coarse grounds into the bottom, and fills the carafe with
close-to-boiling water, stirring the coffee into the liquid, and then letting
it sit. After a period of time sufficient to let the grounds and water merge
into a beautiful, oily sludge, the plunger is pressed down, and a metal
screen pulls the solids in the liquid to the bottom of the chamber. From a
small spout near the top, the coffee can be poured out. Presses come in a
variety of sizes, usually making one to three cups.
The coffee made resembles that of the Italian makers, though smoother,
with more noticeable froth. The machine's slow process lets the coffee
saturate through the water, the heat unleashing and liquefying its potent
aromas, which waft through the air as the mixture brews. Where the
bubbler, once boiling, produces its liquid very quickly, the press is a lazy
machine, self-satisfied. It takes its own damn time; strain the coffee too
soon, and you miss out on much of its potential flavor.
French presses are more transportable than Italian devices, though less
than a basic filter. They require only hot water, but do have to be cleaned
after use. Some travel presses exist, with a screw-on, airtight top. One
makes the coffee, pours it, and screws the top on; there's no danger of the
loose grounds escaping, and cleaning can be done at one's convenience.
So what technology makes the perfect cup? Perhaps it all depends on mood.
Do you like the reliable smoothness of a filter and cone, the steamy kick of
an Italian bubbler, or the refined elegance of a French press? The process
one goes through to make coffee, in this author's opinion, greatly informs
the experience of drinking it. From buying to grinding to brewing, each
step in the process has its own sensory stimuli-the smell of roasting beans
as I walk into Peet's, the sadistic whine of the grinder's silver blades, the
coy, fogged-up glass of my French press. Sure, the coffee will soon course
through my veins, awakening my mind and satiating my brutal caffeine
addiction, but I never let the need for speed, as it were, interfere with my
enjoyment of a mug of steaming, earthy java.
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