Coffee Crafting Essentials: Ratios, Grind, Roast, & More

Be careful with the heat. If you're brewing in a french press or pour-over, and you don't have an electric kettle with temperature settings, after the water comes to a boil, let it sit for 30 seconds to a 1 minute before evenly pouring it onto your grounds. In general, the lighter the roast, the lower the temp. Darker coffees take heat much better.

Fresh roasted coffee has the best aroma, but it is also quite volatile due to the CO2 which is slowly making its way out of the beans over the course of several days. Excellent results may be obtained by actually grinding fresh coffee (that which has been roasted within approximately 10 days) the night before. This helps to deter excessive "blooming" which may lead to harsh and unpleasant flavors due to uneven extraction. Stirring gently after pouring onto your grounds also helps when brewing fresh-roasted coffee.

Make sure your grind level is precisely related to your brewing method.  Different grinders have numbers representing different grind sizes.  Batch size will also affect which grind level you choose. Larger batch sizes will call for a bit courser grind than smaller ones. Tweak, tweak, tweak.  Getting this right is probably the most important element in brewing great coffee.

It is important to remember that the same coffee, of the same farm, will have an immense difference in flavor if one is "washed" and the other is "natural". If you like a more fruity flavor in your coffee, you will like "naturals". If not, stick with washed. Coffees from Sumatra mostly undergo a quite different method of processing called "wet-hulled", embodying that deep-bodied, earthy, rich flavor that many people enjoy. And then there are hybrid methods such as "honey", soft-pulped and anaerobic with are much lesson common but are gaining in popularity.

A water to coffee ratio can also be easily be found on the internet, but it generally varies from 10:1 to 17:1 depending on the equipment and desired strength of the coffee.

Most of our coffees are roasted to a level of Full City+, shy of a dark roast, considerably beyond a light roast. Benefits to this type of roast include a much lower perception of acidity and a coffee that taste "roasty" but not burnt and still pleases at it starts to cool. By drawing on techniques we've acquired over the course of many years, we are still able to preserve the natural complex flavor within each coffee varietal.