Why drink stale coffee? (Part 3 Grinding)
Ok, so now that you have roasted your quality green beans to perfection, how do we get this delicious fresh coffee flavor into water? First, we prepare the beans for extraction by grinding them down to size to increase the surface area.
No matter if you grind the beans coarsely for a French press, much finer for espresso, or almost powder-like for a Turkish coffee, the key is to grind the coffee into a uniform size. If you end up with some grounds that are like powder and some like gravel, you will over-extract from the small pieces and under-extracting from the larger ones.
Over-extraction results in bitterness from taking too much of the soluble flavors from the coffee.
Under-extraction results in sourness and no sweetness.
It’s impossible to achieve a uniform grind with a blade grinder. The blade chops and slices indiscriminately. However, a burr grinder has two serrated rings with jagged edges. As coffee beans get trapped in between, they get lopped off into a uniform size.
If I had a budget for a grinder and espresso machine, I’d spend 80% of it on the grinder. You can use some artistry in using the espresso machine but you can’t finagle a uniform consistency out of a bad grinder.
Now that you have ground coffee, we’d better brew our cup quickly while it’s still fresh! In Part 4, I will talk about popular ways to extract from pour over, to French press, to espresso.
PART 1: https://steemit.com/coffee/@justinlaak/why-drink-stale-coffee-part-1
Part 2: https://steemit.com/coffee/@justinlaak/why-drink-stale-coffee-part-2-roasting
Loved this part!
Grinding and smelling the grinded product is one of my favorite parts in preparation of a join, so I imagine it would be the same with coffee for me :D
Been following , great blog so far! please keep it up! love reading about worlds most favorite morning drink
Since extraction would depend on time in contact and surface area, please try to explain grind coarseness vs. extraction method.
I have found if you use, say, espresso grind in an automatic drip, you can use less coffee, but I expect doing that will give you a more bitter cup than using a courser grind.
I have managed to try many different grind coarseness while hand grinding coffee beans, allowed me to finally pick up the best way to grind it for a perfect cup of coffee.
You should make a submission to The Steemit Food Challange! After all Coffee is a pillar of what a lot of people consider breakfast, which is this week's theme!
Also, there was an announcement just now that there would be a 2nd, 3rd, and 4th prize
And welcome to Steemit btw! It will be fun following you!
Totally loving this blog, you have my follow and upvote! Keep this tasty stuff coming, I can almost smell it now :) Mmm...
Coffee is my Lord, an you just gained a new follower. French press is the way to coffee.
make the coffee with cold water and while drinking drink it in the glass cup and drink it...it tastes so good.
You had my upvote at 'coffee'.
What a wonderful series on my fav drink. Keep up the good work, sir!
quite frankly I am a big fan of Nespresso machine, not only because I don't have anything to do but also but because the coffee is really good.
Before that, I tried standard espresso machine and it deteriorated pretty rapidly leaking all around in no time... hence the nesspresso machin (which may also leak after some time tbh)