I am a confessed coffee geek. When I was a child, I loved even the smell of my parents’ coffee in the morning—Eight O’Clock Coffee from the local A&P—but found the taste a nonstarter. It wasn’t until my 30s that I resorted to it out of necessity for boring-job survival, and even then, it was mostly coffee-flavored sweetened milk. I weaned myself off the empty calories, and now, my kitchen features an espresso machine, a moka pot, two Turkish cezves, a Vietnamese phin filter, a Thai muslin filter, a pour-over dripper, an insulated French press, a digital scale, and a 1910 wall-mount burr grinder.
I thought I’d done my homework, but then I talked to the pros. Brewing tips from these three coffee experts just upped my game.
If you love the true complex taste of coffee, read on. If you don’t, read on anyway, because you might not be getting the best from your beans.
Meet Our Experts
Isaiah Sheese—founder of Archetype Coffee, a roastery with three coffee shops in Omaha, Nebraska—won the 2023 U.S. Barista Championship and ranked fourth in the world competition.Grind Your Beans as You Use Them
Whole beans are the way to go. Once you grind the coffee, the freshness degrades quickly and aromas and chemicals are released—you want those released into the hot water, not the air. Pre-ground coffee has a vast headstart on that decline.“The grinder is the most important piece of your brewing setup at home,” Mr. Clifton said. “You can have the best brewing kit, you can have the most disciplined recipe for your coffee, but if you don’t have a good grinder, your coffee is not going to work.”
All three experts agree: Lose the blade grinder. The resulting grind has pieces of all sorts of sizes and a fair amount of fine dust as well, so “water will always pass through the easiest path of resistance, and therefore give you an under-extracted coffee,” according to Mr. Clifton.
A burr grinder, on the other hand, crushes beans between flat or conical plates until they are small enough to pass. The distance between the two plates can be adjusted to get a finer or coarser grind. The benefit? More uniform pieces.
The ideal grind size will depend on a number of factors. Generally speaking, for drip coffee, “you want it kind of like sand,” Mr. Clifton said (or as Mr. Sheese puts it, “like table salt”). A French press requires it coarse, while espresso takes it really fine.
But there is more to consider. “The darker the coffee is, the finer you grind it,” Mr. Sheese said, referring to the French press. “The lighter the coffee, the coarser you grind it.” This is because the lighter roast leaves more cellular structure intact than the dark roast, so the water has less trouble getting inside to extract flavors. This slight modification will result in a more even extraction for the different beans.
Buy Good-Quality, Freshly Roasted Beans
Coffee is a fruit. That might sound like claiming that pizza is a food group, but it’s true. Coffee cherries are small stone fruits containing two seeds that become coffee “beans” when processed and roasted. The beans are a perishable product; when they’re roasted, there’s a limited time to grind, brew, and consume them if you want to taste them at their fullest.
So spring for the good stuff—fresh, high-quality, whole beans from companies that are open about where they source them. Fair-trade coffee typically deals directly with the producer; a strong relationship between roaster and grower implies trust and accountability, implying good flavor.
“If you buy high-quality coffee ... processed with great attention and care, and roasted well, it can be more complex than some of the most complex beverages on the planet,” Mr. Clifton said.
A lot of what Mr. Clifton calls “commodity-grade coffee”—those big tubs of pre-ground coffee at the grocery store—has been “overly roasted, destroying any intricate, complex, natural flavor properties the coffee might have.”
If you buy the beans in bulk, beware of the shiny ones. “If you’re seeing oil on the outside of the coffee,” Mr. Sheese warned, “in our interpretation, it’s over-roasted or you’re starting to burn the coffee.”
Get a Kitchen Scale
According to the Specialty Coffee Association of America, the proper ratio is one part coffee to 15 parts water.
“Brewing coffee is a recipe,” Mr. Sheese said. You want to be consistent. Many people may think that to change the brew’s strength, you need more beans, but the real solution, he said, is likely making the grind size finer so you can extract more.
The emphasis on proportions compels the serious coffee drinker to another piece of equipment, one that frankly belongs in any semi-serious kitchen where you follow recipes, especially in baking: a scale. Using one can help you dial in the ratio that you prefer.
This goes for all coffee, even the most basic methods. Divide the weight of the water by 15 to get the proper amount of grams of coffee. Don’t be metric averse—grams are small and precise, and you won’t have to deal with decimal points, as you would with ounces (nor with the confusion of weight with volume).
Watch What’s in Your Water
Coffee is 98 percent water, so “you want to make sure that you’re brewing with good water,” Mr. Sheese said. Hard water doesn’t just ruin your faucet; it affects the taste of your brew.But that doesn’t mean you should use distilled water either. “Distilled water’s taking out a lot of minerals. You need those minerals there,” Mr. Clifton said. “What you’re trying to do is eliminate calcium and hardness of the water.”
“It’s an endless rabbit hole, but it completely transforms the flavor of the coffee,” he said.
Don’t Use Boiling Water
Remember the coffee lawsuit episode of “Seinfeld”? “It’s supposed to be hot,” Jerry says, to which Kramer replies, “Not that hot!”
Time It Right
A finer grind needs a shorter brew time.For the French press, “you’re going to be looking for a steep time of four to five minutes because it’s a coarser ground coffee,” Mr. Clifton said. Something like an AeroPress with a finer ground needs only a minute or 90 seconds.
Another reason to wait: When you’re using a French press and push the plunger down, give the grounds time to settle out, and decant very gently to avoid getting them in your cup.
Don’t Go Overboard
The internet is full of instructional videos, some of which dive deep into the science of coffee. A person could use a refractometer to pick apart chemical compositions, but at that point, you may have gone off the cliff.
Despite his obsession with dialing in great coffee, Mr. Sheese leaves us with some wise words about “good” and “bad” coffee. “Everyone likes what they like,“ he said. ”That’s just how it is in everything—beer, wine, coffee. One is not better than the other.”
These brewing tips will help you explore and discover what you like, so you can consistently make the coffee that works best for you.
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