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What is Your Favorite Way to Make Coffee?
markov_chain asks: "For a while I've been making coffee using home-ground whole beans and a standard drip maker. I settled on this method for its simplicity and good taste, even after trying numerous other methods (such as the French press, gravity percolators, and pressure percolators), each coupled with either pre-ground or whole beans. So far, the fresh ground beans are the only factor that made a significant difference in taste. However, when I recently spotted a a site that vaguely extols freshness, I began to wonder how much the freshness of the beans themselves affects the quality. Normally I thought the whole beans would retain the quality far longer, due to less surface area exposed to air, but clearly there still must be a decline; worse yet, it is difficult to gauge that decline since the sellers usually do not advertise the age of the beans. I would now like to pose a few questions. What is your preferred coffee-making method, and how does it compare to other methods you've tried? What are your favorite beans?"
It's in the roast -- the method of roasting -- as much as the variety. Freshness counts, variety counts, but it's the roast that matters the most. I've experienced Jamaca Blue Mountain both in a mild roast and in a dark roast, and they could be two entirely different coffees. The mild roast made me want to compose a sonata, and the dark roast made me want to go scrape barnacles off an oil rig. I ended up doing neither, because I couldn't afford the next cup.
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Ultimate favorite is the Toddy Coffee Maker. Google lists lots of sites. It cold brews coffee into a coffee concentrate over a period of 24 hours. Then to make a cup of coffee you add a shot of the concentrate to a cup of hot water/zap it and drink. Very smooth especially with Columbian coffee, minimal acids and LOTS of caffeine. Cold brewing preserves lots of flavors and oils too. Downside is that the concentrate needs refrigeration as does the reusable filter for the coffee maker. Without refrigeration, or after a while even with it, the concentrate ferments/gets rancid sort of like old iced tea so you have to drink enough to keep it fresh. Somewhat inconvenient but really really good.
Drip brewed using the fine screen rather than filter paper is the 2nd best, particularly with lots of finely ground coffee. I like it best about halfway in strength between regular drip and expresso. Unlike a paper filter, the screen does not perform chromatography on all of the tasty oils in the coffee so more flavor gets to the coffee.
I spend a lot of time in the wilderness and my choice there is a stainless steel percolator on a gas burner with very low flame. If the flame is too high the coffee tastes scorched and bitter, but if it is just enough to perc every 1-3 seconds it produces really strong full flavored coffee. I wait about 15 minutes of percolating. More boils off too much flavor, less makes it weak. YMMV I don't know whether electric percolators work as well, my recollection of electrically percolators is that the coffee tasted bitter but it was decades ago. I have looked longingly at the backpacking expresso maker sold at backpacking stores, and wonder if it really works. Maybe somebody here has used one and could comment.
Now, for the beans vs. ground topic. I have long been a fan of grinding beans but the Costco Columbian ground coffee is so good that it is hard to tell from fresh ground beans. There are good beans and poor beans and maybe I hit a run of poor beans, I think.
Have you really had Kona coffee, not just the 10% crap that many sell these days? Kona has a microclimate that is just right, coupled with perfect mineral composition, leading to what I think of as "perfect" beans. Just as different weather and soil can lead to "perfect" wine making grapes. I do admit, it is what you do with the beans next that leads to the magic...
And while a cast-iron pan is a wonder for cooking damn near everything, you cannot evenly roast with it. Hell, I have two home brew coffee roasters at home. One butane, one hot air. Both makes a wide range of wonderful roasts, with noticable differences with both meathods. And I care not only about location, but size. I prize Kona because its "perfect" bean is the smallest I have ever encountered, enabling a better medium roast without undercooking, or a perfect french without burning. I have found small beans all over the world, each making a fine cuppa', but it is Kona that still makes my heart sing.
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Excellent and informative post about roasting coffee, but I absolutely disagree with you about the taste of Blue Mountain coffee. Where did you have Blue Mountain coffee, and how was it prepared? Was it a blend of seconds from different plantations, as is typically the case with the crap that's usually exported under the Blue Mountain cachet? "Blue Mountain" only refers to coffee grown in designated regions of the Blue Mountains, between 3,000 and 5,500 feet, and YMMV. I'm sure that you wouldn't be surprised to discover that some absolute rubbish beans qualify for the Blue Mountain name.
For some reason, about 95% of the Blue Mountain coffee crop winds up in Japan, and my brother was taken aback on a trip to Tokyo to find chilled cans of the stuff available from vending machines. Japanese buyers pay top dollar for the entire crops from select plantations sight unseen, and the second rate stuff, usually from the plethora of rural folk with some plants growing behind their houses, finds its way to the rest of the world at ridiculous prices. I should add that the interior of Jamaica is very hilly, and many, many homeowners will casually keep a couple coffee plants in their yards in the same way that many North Americans or Europeans will keep a kitchen garden, and expecting them to produce top-class beans is like expecting Mrs. Smith down the block to produce export-quality squash. But hey, they live in the designated growing areas, so they're technically growers of Blue Mountain Coffee(TM). I actually have a few plants in my yard and the coffee is pretty damned good, but since I live at about 2,000 feet above sea level and nowhere the Blue Mountains, it qualifies as "Jamaica High Mountain". Compared to the top quality beans, what is typically available in North America or Europe is an embarrassment to the Blue Mountain name, and I sincerely hope that your experience with Blue Mountain wasn't tainted by an encounter with this second-rate battery acid. I've had Kona, and Colombian, and they don't compare to top-class Blue Mountain.
I drink Blue Mountain coffee every morning, one of the perks [sorry!] of living in Jamaica (my user name is how locals fondly refer to our blessed, cursed homeland, "Jamrock" or "The Rock"). I am fortunate enough to be able to get the green beans of Blue Mountain coffee and I roast them exactly as stated in your excellent post, and grind them myself. I like a robust coffee, so I prefer a fine-ground dark roast, and I despise drip makers, because the water doesn't get hot enough. My favorite preparation method is the Moka Express, a much-battered example of which resides permanently on my stove. Best coffee maker EVAR. Blue Mountain generally has a mild flavor (certainly not "weak" or "insipid"), but it's anything but mild how I prepare it.
That being said, the very best coffee I've ever had wasn't Blue Mountain. It came from the farm of a friend of mine who lives about 20 miles away and 1,000 feet higher up than I do. He used to keep a couple acres of coffee for his personal use, and once in a blue moon he'd generously bestow a few pounds of green beans on each of his friends. Much to my horror, he eventually got sick of locals stripping his plants at night, and decided it was better for his blood pressure to cut them down and remove the temptation, rather than camp out with his shotgun and get himself into serious trouble.
It's always been somewhat interesting to me that the soil and climate of the hilly interior of Jamaica are so conducive to top quality specialty crops. The coffee of course, but Jamaican ginger also enjoys a global reputation for it's strong, sharp flavor. And not to mention the Indica variety of ganja, which has an unusual minty scent and highly aromatic smoke. Or so I've been told....