Why Doesn’t Your Coffee Taste Right?
Have you ever made a cup of coffee at home, and at the first sip, been wildly disappointed? Perhaps it tastes really bad, or perhaps you were imagining the taste of your regular drink at your favorite cafe and it just doesn’t taste quite as good. It happens. We’re here to share with you some potential fixes, and some tips and tricks that may help you brew the coffee you were dreaming of.
The Coffee Beans
Often, people can get the rest of the process of coffee brewing correct while overlooking the most obvious factor: get good quality, fresh beans, the variety you actually enjoy. Think about it in this context; you would never use mushy berries when attempting to make the most delicious smoothie possible. Even if you get the best blender on the market, using bad ingredients defeats the purpose.
So, start by going fresh. In the context of coffee, this means making sure your beans are freshly roasted. Going local is always a good solution to find fresh coffee. The beans sitting on the shelves in the grocery stores were fresh at one point but may have taken a long journey to reach the shelf in front of you. Locally roasted coffee is often more recently roasted, like ours! We sell it freshly roasted at the farmer’s markets every Saturday (locations found here), or you can order bags on the website (found here), or always have the freshest bag of coffee delivered to your doorstep through our subscription services (found here).
Another note about choosing coffee is to make sure you enjoy the variety you buy. Often, people throw all coffees into one flavor box, but there are so many different varieties based on the roast and the flavor profiles. If you’re striving to match the coffee you love from a specific place, you can always ask the barista the details on the coffee they serve you. Or, if you generally don’t like the flavors of the coffee you make at home, ask yourself questions about why. Is it too dark? Try a medium roast. Is it too fruity? Try a coffee with more hearty flavors to back it up, like a coffee with chocolate notes or nutty notes. Explore, and eventually, you will find beans with a roast and flavor profile that you love. Once you find fresh and delicious beans, make sure you store them properly until use, so they remain fresh and full of all the flavors you want in your cup.
The Grind
The proper grind of the beans can make or break a cup of coffee. It is important that the grind is fresh for each cup of coffee brewed to maintain the best flavor possible, but just as important is the grind size and the type of grinder utilized. Different methods of brewing require various grind sizes, so if your coffee doesn’t taste right, it is possible that your grind was either too coarse or too fine for your chosen brewing method. For example, when brewing a coffee via the pour-over method, the coffee grounds should be a medium-fine grind, about as fine as table salt. In contrast, the french press requires a more coarse grind to produce the best coffee. The words “fine” and “coarse” can often be subjective, so an alternate way to find out if your grind is inaccurate is the taste test. If your coffee has sour flavors to it, try to grind the coffee beans finer. If your coffee seems too bitter, try a slightly more coarse grind.
It is also important to note that all the grounds should be the same consistency. Uneven grounds wind up with an inconsistent brew and a cup of coffee that just doesn’t taste quite right. Most of the time, the cause of uneven grounds is the grinder you use. Blade grinders often leave inconsistent grind size, so if you are having trouble with your blade grinder, try swapping it out for a burr grinder. Burr grinders are much more likely to provide you with consistently sized coffee grounds.
The Water
Water is a factor that most people don’t immediately think about when it comes to brewing coffee, but actually the water that you use significantly affects the flavor of the coffee you brew. Part of finding the correct water to use is that you simply want it to be clean and without strong undesirable flavors. A lot of these noticeable flavors can be reduced or removed by common household filters such as a Brita filter. If you aren’t already using filtered water, that is a great place to start.
However, if you already filter the water you use for brewing your coffee and still are not pleased with the quality of your coffee, there’s more to the right water than just the noticeable flavors. The way that water affects coffee brewing actually stems from the chemical makeup of the water you use. The mineral components of your water, especially calcium and magnesium, aid in the extraction of the beans during the brewing process. The proper amounts of these will significantly aid you in achieving the desired flavors from your beans. The other major role that water plays in coffee brewing is the role of buffering the acidity that can come from the beans to result in a balanced cup of coffee. That being said, to get that ideal balanced cup of coffee, you need water that has just the right ability to buffer (the right alkalinity).
Unfortunately, this “perfect” water can be hard to achieve. If you want to use your own tap water, the process of achieving your brewing water begins with finding out what your tap water is already like, knowing exactly what you want, and treating the water so it goes from point A to point B. This can prove to be quite challenging, so let’s discuss a much simpler way of achieving this.
Instead of starting with chemically complex water and altering it in a tedious manner, simply begin with distilled water. Building from this metaphorical “blank canvas,” you are able to treat the water in a way that will bring you the perfect brewing water. If you know exactly what you want in your water, you can treat it in many ways. For the sake of simplicity, however, we love products like Third Wave Water which are crafted for the sole purpose of transforming distilled water into water that’s perfect for coffee brewing.
