Learn to make the perfect cup of coffee in this recording of our Meetup Live coffee demonstration with Starbucks. You’ll learn new aspects about the coffee you love from Lennon Fediw, manager of global coffee education and experience at Starbucks. He’ll cover how to choose your blend, grind the beans, brew coffee with popular devices, including coffee press, Chemex, pour-over, and how to analyze things like aroma, brightness, roast, and acidity.
Main Takeaways:
There are four key elements to brewing a great cup of coffee: proportion, grind, water, and freshness.
- Proportion. How much coffee are you using? How much water are you using? Those two things together is what we know of as coffee. If you use too much coffee or too much water, that proportion is out of balance, and you’re not going to be bringing the right flavors outThe proportion we recommend is 2 tablespoons of coffee for every 6 ounces of water or 10 grams to 180 milliliters if you’re looking at the metric system.
- Not all grinds are the same. You can’t just grind your coffee and assume that it’s going to work everywhere. You need to find the right grind size for the right brew method to be able to extract out flavor the way that you want.
- Water. Water is 98% of a cup of coffee, it’s most of the cup of coffee. So you think about what goes in, is what’s going to come out. If you have water that you wouldn’t want to drink on its own in your home, It’s probably not going to taste good in a cup of coffee.
- Freshness. I want you to think about coffee as an agricultural product. It starts out as the seed of a cherry and because of that, it ages like an agricultural product. Like any agricultural product, the coffee loses its flavor over time. It’s not unsafe to drink by any means. It’s just not going to taste as good as it gets old.
Apply these principles to any brew method you have, and you’re going to end up with a really good cup of coffee.
Top Q&A Questions and Resources:
- Should we keep an open bag of beans in the refrigerator, the freezer, or in the cupboard?
- You want to keep it in a sealed airtight container, if at all possible. As I mentioned it’s going to start oxidizing and you want to keep it out of the heat, so don’t stick your coffee in the sunlight. The best thing to do is fold down the coffee bag really tight, and put it in a nice dark space, but not in an overly cool space.
- How do you measure the temperature of the water to make sure that it’s right?
- If you’re using an electric kettle or if you’re putting it on your stove get it to a boil and then keep it off the flame or off the heating element for a little bit to let it come down into that temperature range. They do make fancier kettles that have thermostats on them that you can set as well, you can also use a thermometer to track the temperature.
Resources:
- To learn more about coffee visit Starbucks Coffee Academy
- Discover where your coffee originated from using Starbucks Traceability
Last modified on October 4, 2022
