The Coffee Drinker's Guide
Are you confused by coffee jargon? Frustrated that your coffee at home doesn’t taste quite as good as at your favourite cafe? If you want to learn more about coffee, join coffee expert Angela Holder as she shares her knowledge and passion for great coffee to help you get better coffee for a happier life. Ironically a bad cup of coffee was the catalyst for Angela's personal coffee journey. It led her into a career in the coffee industry where she discovered what truly makes a coffee taste good. Angela’s mission is to share this information with you so that you have the knowledge you need make better coffee at home and to find the cafes that serve great coffee when you’re not. In short coffee break sized episodes, Angela reveals need-to-know coffee information and coffee industry insights through the lens of a different theme each week. Join Angela on her quest to guide you towards better coffee so that you too can can brew great coffee at home. The best way to tackle life is one coffee at a time. Here’s to better coffee!
The Coffee Drinker's Guide
Brew Like A Pro: Why Filter Coffee Wins For Me Every Time
In a fact-packed episode we take a deep dive into the filter brewing method. Discover the herstory of filter brewing, why it’s the best way to taste the best quality coffee and practical tips to improve your filter brewing technique.
If you've never brewed filter coffee before here’s a recipe to get you started:
For a lighter bodied brew use 15.5g per 250ml cup; for a heavier bodied, more intense brew use 20g per 250ml cup. Heat the water to 90 degrees C/194 degrees F. Grind the coffee to a particle size similar to sand/white granulated sugar/Diamond Crystal salt. Use the filter paper recommended by the cone manufacturer. Pro tip: don’t let the grounds ‘dry out’ during the pour, or in other words, the water level should not drop below the level of the grounds during the brewing process until the last pour is draining into the cup.
1/ Put the filter paper in the cone and the coffee grounds into the filter paper.
2/ Pour a small amount of water to wet the grounds thoroughly but don’t fill the cone above half its height.
3/ Wait for 30 seconds, then pour water into the cone, using a spiral motion from the centre of the cone to the outside, until the water level in the cone is at around 80% full.
4/ Wait for 30 seconds from the point that you finish pouring then pour more water in, using the spiral motion, until the level is back up to around 80% full in the cone.
5/ After another 30 seconds check to see how full the cup is and visually eyeball how much is still in the cone with how much is required to fill the cup. If necessary add a little more water to the cone.
6/ Leave the cone to drain fully on the cup. Ideally you only want to pour as much water into the cone as is needed to fill the cup.
7/ Enjoy!
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Hello and welcome to The Coffee Drinker’s Guide, a podcast for the coffee curious where I explore and explain the world of specialty coffee to make your daily coffee better and more satisfying.
I’m Angela Holder a coffee roaster and writer on a mission to fight back against bad coffee by giving you the knowledge you need to help you get good coffee and a happier (coffee) life in coffee-break sized episodes. So grab your coffee, pull up a chair and take a break…
In this week's episode we are taking a deep dive into the filter brewing method and why its my preferred way to brew coffee…and later I’ll be giving you some tips to help you up your filter brewing game so stay tuned for that…
Filter, pour over, drip. Depending on where you are in the world the name may be different but they all refer to the same brewing method. To confuse things further there are also different versions of the filter cone with names that have become as interchangeable with the brewing method as Hoover is to vacuuming. So if someone suggests brewing you a V60, Kalita Wave, or Chemex they’re not having a word salad moment but are offering to brew you a filter coffee. On a side note a filter brewer is not the same thing as a percolator. While a percolator does use filtration as part of the way that it brews the coffee it also actually recirculates the water over and over through the grounds until it boils, typically producing a weak and bitter brew. If you want to see a barista shudder in horror ask them to brew your coffee with a percolator! But I digress. Without further ado, lets get into filter brewing and find out why it is generally considered the gold standard brewing method for brewing the best specialty coffees…
Firstly filter brewing and the brewer
Often touted as one of the oldest methods of coffee brewing, filter brewing is not in fact as old as immersion brewing, where the ground coffee is fully steeped in water. In fact immersion brewing methods held sway across the coffee drinking world until the 1800’s when new brewing devices began to be developed that separated the grounds from the liquor as they brewed the coffee. These were devices like the percolator, metal drip brewers and cloth filters all of which did the job but didn’t necessarily produce the best tasting coffee. Famously, the desire to produce a better tasting brew free from coffee grounds was the reason why a German woman, Amalie Auguste Melitta Bentz, invented the filter paper using blotting paper to filter the grounds from the brew. She patented her filter paper in 1908 and established the Melitta Company that still produces filter cones and papers today. The company’s invention of the cone shaped filter paper in the 1930’s led to the widespread adoption of the filter brewer. Nowadays there’s an impressive range of cone shapes and materials to choose from. Glass, metal, plastic, ceramic and even wooden cones can be found. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I am the proud owner of four different types of filter cone including the gift of a beautiful fluted ceramic one made by a master Japanese ceramicist that I am still afraid to use for fear of breaking it. Along with the style of filter material used, whether that’s paper, metal or cloth, the cone shape subtly influences the flavour of the brewed coffee via the speed with which the water drains through the grounds and the amount of fine coffee particles and oils that are allowed through into the cup. No matter your preferences there will be a filter brewer that suits you. Though possibly not the wooden one. I hear it makes the coffee taste woody, which is definitely not a favourable coffee flavour in my book.
Next filter brewing and the brew
The filter brewing method uses the percolation of water through coffee grounds to extract the coffee. Hot water is slowly added to coffee grounds held in a cone that is placed on top of a cup or jug to catch the brewed coffee as it passes through the grounds under gravity. Aside from the coffee itself, the variables that influence the flavour of the finished brew are: the amount and coarseness of the grounds, the brewing water temperature, and the way that the water is poured into the cone. If you want to get super nerdy, controlling the water stream by using a gooseneck kettle rather than a kettle with a wide spout will also improve the flavour of the brew. The curious barista can fiddle around with filter brewing variables to their heart’s content - and there are many brewing recipe suggestions on the internet to help you with your experiments. If you are new to filter brewing I will put a recipe in the show notes to get you started. But if you are like me, once you have pinned down the variables to suit your taste, filter brewing provides an easy, reliably repeatable and good brew time after time. It’s also easy to clean up after: filter paper on the compost, cone and cup in the dishwasher. That’ll do for me.
Finally filter brewing and the taste
If you are a regular listener, you will likely have deduced that I am a fan of the filter brewing method - I don’t exactly hide it! The reason is that in my view, filter brewing consistently delivers better tasting coffee than other brewing methods - and crucially with less faffing about. Coffee brewed by the filter method has a clarity to it that most other brewing methods lack. This is due to the filter holding back fine particles of coffee grounds and oils from the finished brew. It does mean that it isn’t as mouthfilling as cafetière or espresso coffee but on the other hand it won’t taste muddy or gritty either. More importantly the filter method allows the acidity and complexity of a coffee to shine. While the coffee’s flavour can be manipulated somewhat by your choice of filter cone and by adjusting brewing parameters, ultimately it is a good method for revealing the nuances and breadth of flavours in a coffee. And that, along with its simplicity, makes filter brewing the best way to explore the many wonderful flavours to be found in coffee.
And now its time for a Frequently Asked Coffee Question…
And this episode’s question is…
What tips do you suggest to help make the best filter coffee?
There a couple of things you can do before you even begin brewing to help make the coffee taste better. Firstly, preheat the cup to prevent a cold cup cooling your brewed coffee too quickly. If you are using white filter papers they have been known to impart a strange flavour to the coffee due to being bleached. So you can kill two birds with one stone by rinsing the empty filter paper in the cone with some hot water, letting it drain into the cup. This simultaneously warms the cup and cone while washing away the taint - but don’t forget to throw away the plain water before you begin to brew the coffee! Next before pouring the water on the coffee grounds gently shake the cone to even out the bed of coffee so that the surface is flat and horizontal. This helps the coffee to extract more evenly. Finally, the flavour of the brew is drastically improved by pre-wetting the grounds at the start of the brewing process. This is where you perform a short initial pour of water onto the coffee in the cone, followed by a pause for thirty seconds for the coffee to bloom and degas a bit before continuing to pour water over the coffee. If you do all of these things your coffee will taste better I promise! Trust me, I’m a coffee roaster!
Thank you for listening to this episode of The Coffee Drinker’s Guide and that was all about filter brewing. Are you as much of a fan as I am or not? Let me know your preferred brewing method on Instagram @thecoffeedrinkersguide, email me at thecoffeedrinkersguide@gmail.com or leave me a text message using the link in the show notes. In the next episode we are taking look at a curious type of coffee bean called a peaberry. If you’ve ever come across it and wondered if this bean deserves the higher price it often commands be sure to hit follow so that you don’t miss it, if you haven’t already. Don’t forget my puzzle book Wordsearch For the Coffee Curious is out now. Click the the link in the show notes to buy your very own copy. And as always if you like the show please share it with your coffee friends and rate and review this podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts to help other coffee curious people find the show too. Thanks to my executive producer Viel Richardson at Lusona Publishing and Media Limited. You can find him at lusonapub.co.uk. Until next time I’m Angela Holder thanks for taking your coffee break with me - the best way to tackle life is one coffee at a time and here’s to better coffee!
The Coffee Drinker’s Guide is a Blue Sky Coffee Project