4nabzeyesonly

[4nabzeyesonly]

The Basics of Home Brewing

The Fundamentals

Home brewing starts with having the right knowledge and the right equipment. In this post, I will be aiming to talk abit about the basics of home brewing, which hopefully sets you off on the right path to learn and experiment more. Now let’s talk equipment. First off, you need coffee. Coffee is full of chemical compounds. Overtime these chemical compounds will naturally oxidise and degrade, which is why you always wanna buy whole beans. You can afford to buy pre-ground coffee in a pinch, which your local roaster can do it for you, but to get the best results you wanna grind your coffee just before you brew to maintain and preserve its chemical compounds. Once you buy your local whole bean coffee, check the roast date. If your beans were roasted the day before, give it some time to rest. Let it sit for about 4-5 days before you start using it for filter coffee.

Next, grinder. The grinder is important as you want something which will provide a nice uniform distribution of grounds to allow an even extraction of coffee. You can opt for an electrical grinder, or if you don’t mind the extra effort a manual hand grinder can provide excellent results for the price. Usually these grinders are equipped with a conical burr set which is the most ideal when it comes to grinding coffee.

Next, your brewer. There are loads of different types of brewers. I opted for an Aeropress for you which is cheap, durable, its easy to travel and its just a nice looking thing in my opinion.

Fourth, water. Now water might sound stupid but it makes up the entirety of your cup of coffee. Now most coffee geeks out there use some sort of filtered water or even bottled water. But that’s a topic for way into the future. However, other aspects of water are still important to take note - mainly temperature and the act of pouring of water. Temperature is important cause with coffee you don’t want to use boiling water as it’ll actually start to burn your coffee. With coffee there is sort of an ideal range of temperatures from between 92 - 96 degrees celsius. Now of course saying that, it’s hard to gauge what is 92 -96 which is why most baristas have thermometers to measure the ideal brewing temperature. Most baristas usually also opt for a pouring kettle or sometimes referred to as a gooseneck kettle. Now this kettle just allows for you to really control your pours hence allowing for a steady stream of water for even extraction. Most pouring kettles these days come built-in with a thermometer so win-win. You can either opt for an electric kettle which is the best or a stovetop kettle would do just fine too. However, whilst having a pouring kettle certainly helps you, it’s not a necessity unless you’re really aiming to improve your brewing.

Lastly, scales. A digital scale is important as it allows you to measure the weight of coffee and water that you brew with. It eliminates the guesswork out of your morning routine but more critically, it allows you to replicate recipes easily in order for you to be able to improve.

The Beans

Nothing tastes good without good coffee beans. The best equipment paired with low quality beans will provide you just a well-made terrible cup of coffee. Make sure you source out for local roasteries which give you details and traceability on their coffee beans. Blends are good as they comprise several different coffee beans which brings forth an array of flavours. It aims to give you a nice overall balance and a slightly heavier body in your cup, paired with the fact that they’re roasted longer for espressos which will give you those caramel and chocolatey flavours you love. Single origins are aimed so customers can appreciate the full flavour of the coffee beans harvested from a single area and their lighter roast towards filter coffee will give more distinct, brighter flavours. Don’t be afraid to try these flavours as it will open up your palette to so much more.

Three coffee regions you should know and their flavour profiles in general. First off, Central / South America. This should be the region with your favourite coffee profiles if I know you well. They usually have some form of sweet flavour involved be it chocolate, or caramel or nutty. They tend to be fruity but not crazy acidic, think of a mildly acidic fruit like an apple. When you’re shopping for single origins, Guatemala, El Salvador, Brazil, these are the places you wanna look out for. Next up, East Africa. Coffee beans here are grown at higher elevations which means there’s less oxygen. This results in flavour that is fruity, zesty and amplified acidity. Places like Ethiopia and Kenya are renowned for bringing forth very refreshing and bright coffee flavours. Lastly, we have Asia - places like India and Indonesia. They tend to be earthy, woody and spicy. Nothing about those flavour notes temp me in the slightest to wanna try coffee grown here.

The Grind

The overall success of brewing coffee is all about marrying grind size and brew time. Generally, the finer you grind - which means the coffee particles are smaller hence there is more surface area exposed, the shorter the brew time should be. If we look at espressos, you generally pull a shot in about 30 seconds, which is why the grounds used in making an espresso are extremely fine. Now if we look at the opposite end of the scale, we see something like a french press. You brew french press in something like 4 minutes, hence the coffee grounds used are much coarser. Generally for an Aeropress you should be aiming for a medium-fine grind, however different recipes calls for different grind sizes.

Once hot water is added, essentially what you are doing is extracting the coffee from the beans by dissolving its soluble materials. Inside a coffee bean, there is a given amount of soluble materials. Now we don’t want all the soluble materials inside our cup of coffee. Generally, for the sake of easy maths, we want about 20% of the components inside the coffee bean extracted to make coffee. If we grind finer, and brew with longer periods of time, we extract more soluble materials than what we need - hence we call this over-extraction, which results in a cup of coffee that is very bitter. On the flipside, if we grind coarse but brew for shorter periods, then we have under-extraction which results in a cup of coffee that is very weak and hollow.

The quality of the grinder is therefore very important. You want a grinder which will provide a nice uniform distribution of grounds. You want to minimise the overall distribution to allow a nice even extraction of coffee. Too many large boulder bits of coffee grounds will result in under-extraction whilst the small, fine powder pieces will result in bitter over-extracted coffee.

The Brew

The brew is the last step of preparing your coffee. Of course there are many different methods of brewing coffee. We have the Aeropress, the french press, the pourovers (which in itself has many different brands of pourovers thus providing different outcomes), the espresso and so on.

However, we can broadly categorise all the brewing methods into 2 main categories: immersion and percolation. With immersion, it means that all your coffee grounds are steeped into your coffee for a period of time, before they are finally filtered through to result in a clean cup of coffee. With percolation, the water is actually passing through a bed of coffee and it extracts coffee as the water travels through the coffee particles before finally being filtered resulting in your cup of coffee. So Aeropress and French press, they’re immersion techniques while your pourovers and espressos are percolation methods. Whilst there’s no one method that is better than others, it is all down to preference at this point. Just taste as much coffee as you can, and spread your love for delicious coffee to those around you.