Grinding your Coffee | Brewing your Coffee

The Basics:

Water

The basis of good coffee is of course good, fresh coffee. Drip coffee is 98% water, so of course good water is essential. Tap water has chlorine and lots of other impurities which affect the flavor of your brew. Distilled water, the most pure form, is not good either: it tastes 'flat', and is lacking minerals instrumental in extracting maximum flavor from your cuppa. I recommend spring water, the best being Fiji and Ice Age. Arrowhead, Dasani, and similar waters are fine. Britta works, too. Basically, anything is generally better than than nothing.

Coffee

Ah, the coffee! This section could take up pages, but I'll try to keep it simple.

YOU NEED FRESH BEANS!!!

That's more or less it (and of course you knew that!)

You can have the best beans in the world, roasted by a master roaster, but if they've sat on the shelf for 2 months, it isn't worth squat. Beans are best from day 2 out of the roaster, through day 10 for espresso. For drip, the longest I'd go is 3 weeks, and that is REALLY pushing it. It's best to only order what you can use in that window of freshness.

They should always be stored as whole beans (never ground- ground beans go stale in hours), in tin-tie coffee bags, or better yet in an air-tight container, away from light and heat. Storing beans in the freezer is not a great idea. Every time you remove them from the freezer, condensation forms, which leaches flavor from them. I'd only do it if you absolutely HAD to store beans for over three weeks.