The perfect cup of coffee is perfectly repeatable. Variables are constrained, and you enter a regime of hunting local maxima. Small and controlled changes to understand their impact on your brew.
There is no perfect cup, everyone has their own preferences on oils and particulate matter and so on. Some folks love the rich mouth-feel of a cup from the French press, other folks like it strong out of the Aeropress, some folks won’t touch it unless it came from a ten-thousand dollar espresso machine lovingly kept in tune all day by a barista with a Master’s of Social Work.
Here’s how I make coffee, in the most repeatable and reliable fashion. Minimal tooling, minimal overhead, minimal complexity, maximal repeatability.
Tools:
- burr grinder
- Clever coffee dripper
Instructions:
- Measure out and boil 12 ounces of water.
- As soon as the water boils, turn the kettle off, weigh out and grind 20 grams of fresh beans.
- Line the Clever with a paper filter
- Dump ground beans into the Clever
- Pour in just enough water to soak the grounds (this allows the CO2 to “bloom” off, and prevents the grounds from floating and not soaking fully in the brewing medium)
- Bloom the grounds for 1 minute
- Pour the rest of the water into the Clever
- Soak grounds for another 3 minutes
- Decant
Simply, perfectly, fool-proof-edly repeatable.
Get 3 Clevers, because they’re guaranteed to go out of production in the next decade, and then you’ll be stuck doing pour-overs again, with all the asinine variance that imposes on the process.