There’s really an art to brewing a great cup of coffee. It’s not hard. It’s all about your personal preferences, and a few great tips.
- Prep – Make sure your coffee maker is clean. The buildup of coffee oil can actually cause the coffee to taste bitter and rancid.
- Fresh Beans – Use freshly roasted coffee, and don’t grind your beans until you are ready to use them. Fortunately, as part of the Javalution Coffee Club, you’ve got the best coffee beans in hand!
- Grind – We recommend an adjustable burr-style grinder for consistency. How fine you grind the beans is up to you, but it will affect the taste. For a lighter brew, your beans should be more coarse. For a darker brew, you will want to grind them longer and more fine. We recommend a medium-coarse grind for most coffees and tastes. Play around with this feature on your grinder to determine what you really like the most. You’ll be surprised by how different your coffee will taste based on the grind.
- Brew – Using fresh, filtered or good tap water is recommended. The water-to-coffee ratio is again personal preference, and something you should explore. In general, one to two tablespoons of ground coffee to every six ounces of water is a good blend.
- Enjoy – Once your coffee has brewed, we recommend enjoying it soon, as the flavor is best when fresh. But WAIT—before you do anything to your cup of coffee, before you sip it, add any kind of creamer or sweetener to it—just follow the advice of our resident coffee expert, President and CFO Dave Briskie: “Just pick the cup up in your hands and smell it. Our sense of smell actually awakens our taste buds, and if you take a minute to just smell the wonderful aroma of the coffee, it will taste that much better. It’s a minor change that adds to the ritual of having a cup of great coffee…just take the time to smell it first.”