Coffee Brewing

Fresh coffee means freshly roasted beans, less than 10 days since roasting. Use your coffee grinder before brewing, and brew the coffee for immediate use.  Coffee should not be kept on the burner.  Any excess coffee should be transferred immediately to a vacuum bottle for storage.  Continued heating will cause the light aromatics -- the things we like to smell and taste -- to evaporate before we can drink them.

There are multiple ways to brew coffee. Some of these are:

• Drip coffee makers
• French press, a.k.a. press pot
• vacuum pot, e.g. Cona, Yama, Bodum
• Espresso machines

There's a lot of great information on coffee brewing, and, of course, coffee roasting, at Sweet Maria's

I used to use a Krups Pro-Aroma for drip coffee in the morning, a French-press for leisurely sipping in the evening.

The Krups Pro-Aroma has been retired for a machine I like a lot better.  As I describe in my Journey, I bought a Cuisinart Brew Central DCC-1200.  This is a retro-look stainless and black model drip machine.  Coffee flavor has been much improved by using the new machine. I combined the BrewCentral with a SwissGold filter. The flavor is much more concentrated than when I tried using either bleached or unbleached paper filters.

Now, my mornings usually start with an eye-opening Americano from my Rancilio Miss Silvia espresso machine. While I'm drinking it, I fix my daily pot of drip coffee in the BrewCentral. Later in the day, I shift back to a regular or decaf Americano. After dinner, I usually fix a vacuum pot of fresh-roasted decaffeinated coffee.

Copyright © 2003-2006 Terry A. Stockdale. All rights reserved.