Coffee

Let's face it: coffee is delicious. Well, eventually. When I was younger I couldn't stand the stuff. In fact, necessity is the only factor that encouraged me to start drinking it. There was a similar situation for me with beer, but the "necessity" factor is harder to apply while remaining completely truthful. The situation driving my need to learn to drink coffee was breakfast. While in culinary school, there was a breakfast cookery class that began at 2:00am. Officially I think it was scheduled to begin at 3:00am, but everyone started showing up around 2:00 since it took so long to get your brain and body functioning to the point that you could handle flame and knives without catastrophic injury.

In my time in restaurants (and teaching in fancy-schmancy kitchen stores), I have learned several key items to consider to make an ideal cup of coffee. These things may seem relatively straightforward, but since we've all had bad cups of coffee, someone must be mucking it up somewhere in the world.

The first thing is the selection and storage of the beans. Preferably you want whole beans, and this isn't a "class" or "luxury" issue, it is a bona fide requirement to producing better coffee. The reason is this (and this is very important): coffee is the result of the OILS in the beans being washed out with hot water and then drunk. These oils have a shelf life and will go rancid. For every second that passes between the grinding of the beans and the brewing of the coffee, oils are evaporating or drying out or being rubbed onto packaging, all of which detracts from the eventual flavor of your beverage. It's as though the whole coffee bean is acting as a little oil storage and protection pod. This effects storage as well. Keeping your coffee fresher by putting it in the freezer is a time-honored tradition, and also completely useless. Have you ever tried to freeze a bottle of oil? It has no effect on the shelf life whatsoever. On the other hand, it won't hurt the beans, so if you're short some shelf space go ahead and throw the bag in the freezer. If you do not use a disposable container for your beans and put them in a jar or hopper, it is vitally important that you clean the damn thing out once in a while! This is because the oil from the beans will rub off on the sides of the container, and eventually will go rancid. This means that each time you refill said container without cleaning it you are dumping clean, fresh, delicious beans with bright futures into a ratty swamp of rotten oils. I can almost guarantee this is why gas station coffee is so bad - they just keep refilling the hopper on their grinder with new beans and never clean it out.

That being said, the next concern is the level of grind and the appropriate ratio of grounds to water. As a general rule, the level of grind should be determined by how long they are in contact with the water (i.e. large, rough grind for percolators or a French press, fine grinds for a filter or coffee maker, very fine grind for an espresso machine). Also, coffee mills are better than coffee grinders because they are more consistent, and you wont have to worry about the random huge unground chunk. The rule of thumb for the ratio is one tablespoon of grounds for each cup of water. Stronger is almost always better, so a little extra grounds probably won't hurt.

Other than that, coffee is easy.