Beans of Wisdom
First and foremost, coffee is best kept as a wholebean for as long as possible. You should really only grind when ready to immediately make your coffee by whichever brew method you prefer. This will preserve and deliver the fullest flavour and hopefully allow you to taste some more of the interesting flavour profiles that make up beans of different regions.
Coffee comes from two main and different strains, these are, Coffee Robusta and Coffee Arabica. Most commodity coffee is made from Robusta, a much more caffine filled bean which tends to be blended to iron out all the weird flavour profiles and its particulary bitter aftertaste. Arabica tends to be used by speciality coffee houses who are as interested in how the bean has been looked after from plant, all the way through picking, drying, shipping and roasting, to bring the best cup of coffee possible to the table.
The correct grind of coffee will get you the correct flavour in the cup, experiment as much as you can and be aware that differences in temperature or humidity can affect the way your coffee extracts.
Type of brewing/extraction or just plain old how do you take it.
French Press (often called Cafitiere)
Filter
Stovetop
Syphon
AeroPress
Cowboy Style
Espresso
Cold Brew
How do you grind?
Most brew methods will forgive an amount of the wrong grind, but try to follow this simple procedure.
If your method involves the grounds sitting in water or water passing through them slowly the grind needs to be like course sand, allowing for plenty of surface area so coffee will extract over time.
If you are going to force water through it at high pressure in a matter of seconds it needs to be very small and the grounds need to be of similar size. Think somewhere between salt (large) and flour (small).
Do weigh your coffee grounds per serving, this will make sure you are tasting coffee in a similar way which will help in discovering what really suits you.
We recommend 60g of freshly ground coffee to 1000ml of water for brewing of a French press, or drip filter
20g of freshly ground coffee to a 4 aeropress
17.5g of freshly ground coffee for a double espresso/ristrotto with an extraction time of around 24 seconds
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