BJ Roasters

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Cup Drip

December 28th, 2005

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Amazon's Bestselling Coffee Makers

best way to make a good cup of coffee?

theres so many different coffee makers around which is the best way to make a great cup?

should i use the usual machine that drips it slowly through a filter or one of the new fancy cappuchino or espresso makers?

A few things to keep in mind:

The quality of the water used to brew coffee is very important. If it's available you should use filtered or bottled, distilled water. This removes minerals from the water that can adversely affect the flavor of the coffee. In addition it decreases the number of times you have to decalcify your brewing equipment. Remember that over heated water (above the boiling point) makes for bitter tasting coffee and water that is too cold makes for underextracted (weak) coffee.

I recommend the purchase of high quality beans. The factors that affect your coffee are: The country the beans come from, the variety of bean grown, the growing conditions in a particular year and the general climate, the method used to harvest the beans, how they were processed to produce the dry, green bean without the pulp, and the storage conditions of the beans on their long journey to the roaster. All of these things have an effect on the quality of the coffee in your cup. Coffee can be like wine or beer or scotch in its complexity of nuanced flavor and aroma and its dependence on a myriad of factors affecting the final product. Some rules of thumb when buying coffee: 1.) You should look for freshly roasted whole beans, if possible. If you're in the grocery store look for packages of whole beans that have an expiration date, since these are more likely to be fresh. 2.) If you have a local coffee roaster, ask the person behind the counter which beans they have that are the most recently roasted. 3.) Don't buy any under roasted, sub-standard, pre-ground, poor-excuse-for-beans coffee. My advice: stick to the brands that you think cost too much.

Make sure you coffee equipment is clean! You should wash everything using hot soapy water every time you use it. It may look clean if you just rinse it out, but it’s not. Coffee oils cling and go bad and taste bitter and ruin your perfect pot of coffee.

As for the best equipment to make coffee with? The French Press or cafetière is considered by many to be the best coffee-making method. This may be because of the snob appeal that the look of the thing has, or the fact that it is more labor intensive in terms of making the coffee and cleaning the equipment. Or it may be that it produces simply the most heavenly cup of non-espresso coffee to be had in this hard, hard world. In any event, it’s not really that hard to make coffee using a French Press, if you don't mind taking a little time and paying attention to a few details. The construction of this coffee maker is beautifully simple. It consists of a glass carafe that usually has a handle attached to it. The other part of the apparatus is a lid into which is built a plunger with a knob that protrudes through the top of the lid. This plunger filters the grounds of the coffee with a steel mesh that fits perfectly inside the glass carafe.

Krups Drip Tray

$8.49

Drip Tray

Krups Drip tray

$14.99

Drip tray

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