HOW TO BE AN ADULT

The Best Way To Start Making Your Own Coffee

Jan 24, 2017 @16:45 PM

·Updated: Jun 28, 2019 @07:14 AM

Everyone enjoys a nice cup of coffee. And since a cup of coffee requires only two things, hot water and ground coffee beans, there are ways to make coffee that are inexpensive, easy and as good as or better than something from a can or a cup with your misspelled name on it.

This is not a guide to being a coffee snob. We're not here to convince you that you need to spend an entire paycheck on coffee equipment and then shell out a bar tab's worth on a bag of coffee every week.

This is a guide to finding a middle ground between a Keurig machine and full-blown coffee snobbery. Because making your own coffee will save you money, give you a satisfying morning ritual and bring you one step closer to being a fully-autonomous adult.

To help with this, we enlisted the help of Alex Bernson, who used to write about coffee for a living over at Sprudge and has been brewing his own coffee since high school. Despite all the paraphernalia, jargon and technical craft on display at your local coffee shop, Bernson explains there are really only four things to consider when it comes to making coffee: the beans, the grinder, the brewer, and the water.

So let's get started with the most crucial part of coffee-making.

Beans And Grinding

Above everything else — the beans, the brewing method, the water — the one thing that has the biggest impact on the quality of a cup of coffee is how freshly ground the beans are. All delicious flavor of coffee comes from the oils trapped within the beans. Once ground, those oils and aromas begin to escape into the air. So, if you want a good cup of coffee you need to grind your own beans.

"The most economical, sustainable, and tastiest way to make coffee, however you do it, is to grind it fresh from beans," says Bernson.

Really, you could buy a cheap bag of beans from Dunkin Donuts, grind 'em up, brew 'em in an automatic dripper, and you'd have, by most standards, a good cup of coffee.

Which means, if you want to make coffee, you'll need, at a bare minimum, a coffee grinder. You can spend a stupid amount of money on one and your coffee snob friends might recommend that you buy one that is out of your price range. But you don't have to.

Since we're trying to get you into making coffee and not into debt, we don't recommend you spending anything over $250. Going off The Sweethome's comprehensive buyer's guide to coffee grinders, there are three options. A $230 grinder, a $77 grinder and a $33 hand grinder. The $230 option will net you a more even grind, which will net you a better-tasting cup of coffee. If you're just looking for something that works and won't break the bank the budget option is fine. And if you're into saving money in exchange for some manual labor, hand-grinding is also fine, although it can turn into a real chore if you're regularly making coffee for more than yourself.

That said, don't feel like you need to get all caught up in the gear. "Buying a spinning blade grinder is better than not grinding fresh coffee," says Bernson. One of those will set you back $20 from your local store. The grind will be uneven, which is not ideal, but it'll still be better than pre-ground coffee.

As for what beans to buy, Bernson doesn't recommend anything in particular. "I don't think you need to go nuts buying the nicest coffee ever," he says. "The limiting factor in your coffee experience is probably not going to be whether or not you spend 15 or 20 dollars on your bag of coffee."

As with grinding, you'll want something that's been roasted fairly recently. As mentioned earlier, you can get away with just using a cheap bag of whole bean coffee. But if you're looking for a "good" bag of coffee freshness is paramount. Bernson suggests you find a bag from a local roaster, and just go from there. If it's been roasted nearby, chances are it hasn't been sitting on a truck for days at a time. And hey, who doesn't love supporting local business?

Aside from beans and something to grind them with, you'll need something to figure out how much you're grinding. A digital scale is useful — here's The Sweethome's recommendation, which costs $27 — because you'll also use it to figure out how much water to add. Which brings us to the other half of the coffee equation.

Water And Brewing

You might not realize this, but coffee requires hot water. You'll need something that can both boil water and make it easy to saturate the grounds. If you already have an automatic coffee maker and just want to keep using that, then that's cool! You're basically done.

If you do not, you have some choices.

You can certainly buy an automatic dripper. Again, The Sweethome is instrumental here with a $37 option, and Kitchenaid has a fancy $169 machine that emulates the pourover style of brewing. As long as you use freshly-ground beans with the proper amount of water (more on that in a bit) it'll make, excuse me, a damn fine cup of coffee. That said, automatic drippers require regular cleaning and they're arguably overkill if you're just making a cup or two at a time.

Another option is the French press, the most basic and easiest brewing method out there. It consists of two parts. A carafe, usually glass or plastic, and a meshed plunger that filters out the grounds. Its operation is almost as simple as the automatic drip. Place grounds in the bottom of the carafe. Pour hot water on them. Let it brew between 4-7 minutes. Push the plunger down to keep the grounds at bay, pour into a cup and then enjoy. A decent 1-liter plastic one — Bernson recommends plastic over glass for durability sake — shouldn't run you more than $20.

Obviously, if you go the French press route you'll need a kettle to boil water in. We trust that you can buy a kettle and boil water with it. Although, to save time, you can buy an electric kettle, which will cut down on the time you need to wait for water to boil in half.

A third, and for our purposes final, option is for those who want to get a little fancy: Pourover. As the name implies, the Pourover method involves you placing a filter into a dripper cup, putting the grounds in the filter, placing the dripper cup on top of a coffee cup or carafe, and pouring water over the grounds. Pourover is the platonic ideal of "fancy coffee" because the actual process of brewing a cup of coffee just looks so precious.

When done right — for a detailed guide check out Serious Eats — it can yield a very good cup of coffee. Some would argue, the best.

The drawbacks however, are numerous. You'll need more gear: A dripper, filters and a kettle with a long narrow spout that makes it possible to pour water evenly. And the process is a little more fussy.

This, personally, is how I make coffee and on average, it takes me about 10 minutes to make a cup of coffee from the second I start boiling water to the second I take that first sip. That said, if your mornings aren't too crazy and you're into the ritual of making coffee, there are few options better than pourover. It's sort of like buying a tube amp and a record player — the gateway into a hobby that will only make you hunger for increasingly small improvements that cost exponentially more.

Out of these three, there really is no "right" answer. "There are a lot of ways to make a good cup of coffee," says Bernson. "Making it easy and making it something that fits into your day is important."

Making A Cup Of Coffee

So you have your beans, a grinder, a scale and your hot water, now what? Irrespective of the brewing method, the basics are simple. You'll be pouring hot water over coffee grounds.

But how much coffee should you be grinding and how much water should you be pouring? Too little water and the coffee might taste too bitter, too much and it'll be too thin. And just how fine or coarse should the grind be?

All very important questions! The answer is, well, it's all up to your taste. A good starting point is a 19-to-1 water to grounds ratio, grinding the beans at a medium coarseness setting. So for every gram of coffee you grind, you'll be pouring 19 grams of water over it. For most people, that means 20 grams of grounds and 380 grams of water. That'll net you two smaller cups or one kinda-generously-sized cup.

There is, of course, some nuance to it. Equal Exchange Coffee has a handy guide that outlines various brewing methods and provides suggested coarseness and water-to-coffee ratios. French presses require a coarser grind because the filter isn't as fine, and pourover can get away with a finer grind because of the paper filter. Still, we're talking a difference between medium-coarse and medium-fine, with variances of 1-2 grams water per gram of coffee. When it doubt: Medium grind, 19-to-1 water to grounds.

So here's how it works. You wake up. Start the kettle if you're not using a coffee machine. Take your scale, find a cup and place it on top of that scale. Hit the tare button to zero it out. Measure out 20 grams of beans. Grind those beans. If you're using a coffee machine pour water up to the 2-cup mark. If you're using a French press or pourover, place the vessel on top of the scale, zero it out, and then do the respective brewing procedure, stopping when the scale hits 380 grams.

There it is, you're done. You made a good cup of coffee. Your kitchen probably smells great right now. Now we just need to figure out how to feed yourself.

FAQ

You didn't mention anything about milk and sugar. Are those bad?

Drinking coffee black is considered by some to be a badge of honor, and by others the only way to really "taste" the coffee. But it would be silly to think that drinking it black is the Best Way to Drink Coffee. Even Bernson, who is a self-processed Coffee Nerd, will sometimes add milk and sugar to dark-roasted coffee. In other words, milk and sugar are there to compliment the coffee. There is no real "wrong" way to use them. Experiment with them. Maybe you add milk and sugar for some coffees and only milk for others. It's all up to you!

What about light and dark roasts?

Again, all up to personal preference! Bernson recommends that you try them all and see what tastes good to you. Dark roasts are going to taste, uh, more roasted, while light roasted coffees might taste more acidic and have more nuanced flavor profiles.

You can do some exploring on your own, or you can subscribe to a coffee service like Coffee Collective, which will send you a bunch of different beans to try at your leisure.

This also sort of goes hand-in-hand with the milk and sugar thing. Maybe you like dark roasted coffee with milk and sugar and light roasted coffee with just a hint of milk. Who knows? Only you!

I'm a big fan of iced coffee, what about this thing called cold-brewing?

Oh man, just like hot coffee, there are a bunch of ways to make iced coffee. You can cold-brew, which is basically letting coffee grounds steep in cold water in your fridge overnight. You can make coffee concentrate, which leaves you the option to add either hot or cold water to it depending on how you feel that day. There's also the Japanese brewing method if you already have a pourover setup — which just replaces some of the water with ice cubes.

My coffee friends say I should get something called a Clever?

Ah yes! The Clever coffee dripper was omitted from the initial three choices because it kinda falls in between the French press and a pourover. Like, it literally looks like a pourover dripper, delivers a cup of coffee that tastes similar to a pourover dripper, but lets you just dump all the water in at once like a French press. It's good, a cheap and easy way to see if you'd be into pourover coffee without having to dive headfirst into pourover setup. If you're curious about the Clever, also check out the Aeropress, which is yet another way to brew coffee that looks insane but is easy as heck.