Dropping The Drip: How To Get Started With Better Coffee Making

Like computers, coffee is complex, easy to sink money into, and attracts a vast swath of opinions. And like computers, there is a wise middle path you can walk to get top-notch coffee at home without spending MacBook-like money on brewing gear.Image via Mat Honan.

What will you get out of this treatise on slightly snob-ish coffee? A better understanding of why the standard means of buying, storing and making coffee leaves much to be desired, followed by a rundown of some of the better, and less expensive, coffee-making methods — what I call hand-crafted coffee — and how it’s sometimes faster, and usually more fun, than making a pot of the classic drip stuff or just sticking with instant.

There are two things you should know up front. First: I’m not a coffee expert. In fact, as of a month ago, my coffee came primarily from baristas, a Keurig single-serve machine (photographic evidence here, a standard drip machine, or, on leisurely weekends, a French press that I knew two-thirds of the instructions for. To rectify this, I spent a month experimenting with at-home coffee methods, foisting blind taste tests on friends and co-workers, and researching what I call the Taste-to-Fuss Ratio. I also betrayed everything I once held dear about caffeine dependency.

Second: Your taste in coffee is different to mine. You might be looking for a smooth, gentle cup to accompany your drive to work, while I’m hoping my next cup tastes like pure Arabic gold. You get the freshest, single-source beans you can find from a local source, while I’m okay with the occasional cup of Eight O’ Clock.

What You Get by Leaving Automatic Drip Behind

Standard drip coffee makers have their uses. Automatic timers can be mighty helpful, especially the night before you fly out. If you’re making coffee for ten people after dinner, it’s easy to just load up, hit a button, and meet standard expectations. In my blind tests, too, some drinkers, given the right beans, ranked certain cups of drip above the hand-crafted competition.

But there are means of making coffee at home that can take less time than a drip maker. And you’re making a few sacrifices for set-and-forget:

• You usually use twice as much coffee: Water drains through ground coffee in an automatic machine at a relatively rapid pace, getting less direct exposure to the stuff than with most other means. That’s why most bags of good coffee suggest using two tablespoons per six-ounce serving. It’s a tablespoon here and there, but it adds up quickly if you actually drink the stuff.

• You can’t adjust two of three key elements: The key variables in coffee making are water temperature, the amount of coffee used in relation to the water, and the amount of time the coffee is brewed with the water. With a drip coffee maker, you can only control one of those three elements, and not that precisely.

• Lingering, hard-to-clean tastes: It’s relatively easy to clean out a glass carafe or metal container after you make coffee with it—you kind of have to, actually. Unless you’re meticulous about cleaning your drip maker after each use, its tubes and crevices accumulate residues, and the carafe itself usually smells faintly of whatever was last inside it.
The Tools of the Better Coffee Trade

To get better coffee, you need to to expose hot water to more high-quality coffee. That means doing a few things differently than you’re told by mass coffee merchants. Buy freshly roasted coffee:
Hopefully, somewhere near you, there’s a coffee merchant that roasts beans on-site and stamps their coffee with the date they roasted it. If you can’t find that merchant, find one in the area that sells to a nearby store. If that’s out of the realm, and you’re really game for committing to better coffee, consider buying your own green beans and roasting them yourself. It’s probably not as hard as you might think, and you’ll actually have some real coffee nerd bragging points. Image via B*2.

I didn’t quite get the impact of fresh-roasted coffee until a recent trip to Los Angeles, during which I visited Intelligentsia in Silver Lake. The cappuccino was strong — not heavy, not bitter, but just muscular in its flavour. The single-origin beans on the shelf were so fragrant, I grabbed them more than once during stops in LA traffic for quick aromatic stress relief. It got ridiculous — I could convince myself that Intelligentsia was “on the way” if it only added 6km to a straight-shot trip. Ask Whitson.