How To Make French Press Coffee
Ive said many times before, and Ill say it again. The best place to begin with any kind of coffee is withgood coffee. As in, good beans.
Buy good ones. Buy them whole. And then for French press, grind them immediately before using them to a coarse ground. They should be about the consistency of breadcrumbs.
Then measure out the amount of coffee you would like to use. Everyone has different opinions here about their preferred coffee-to-water ratio. I like to weigh my beans before grinding them, and use 52 grams per 4 cups of water. But if you dont have a scale, that is the equivalent of about 1/2 cup of beans before they are ground. So for different sizes of French presses, that would mean:
- 8 cup* French press = 4 cups of water = 1/2 cup whole beans
- 4 cup French press = 2 cups of water = 1/4 cup whole beans
- 2 cup French press = 1 cup of water = 2 tablespoons whole beans
- 1 cup French press = 1/2 cup of water = 1 tablespoon whole beans
*Again, dont get confused by the cups thing. If you purchase a French press that says its an 8-cup French press, that means it will hold about 4 cups of water, and thus produce 8 servings.
The first step is to heat your water to boiling. Once it reaches a boil, pull it off the heat and let it rest for 45 seconds. Ideally you want the water to be 195 degrees F, but I never measure.
Wait 1 full minute for the coffee to puff up and bloom.
Once the total 4 minutes are up, gently push the plunger down until it firmly reaches the bottom.
Get The Right Type Of Coffee Grounds
With so many amazing coffees at our fingertips today, take some time to read the descriptions and choose the flavor that appeals to you. Good coffees will show their strength on the packet , helping to guide you towards the one that will suit your palate the best.
What is essential though, is the grind of the coffee. For the French press, the grind of the bean needs to be medium to coarse for optimum performance. If its too coarse, it can block the filter. Likewise, if its been over-milled, the very fine granules can slip though the filter and muddy your brew. What you can be sure of though, is that youll have complete control with the French press to achieve the taste that you love.
After 60 Seconds Stir The Grounds With A Spoon
While you’re waiting, check Twitter, text your mom and think about how great this coffee’s going to be. After 60 seconds, use a spoon to break up the cake-y layer of grounds that’s formed on top of the water. Fill the carafe to the top with water, using a circular pouring method to soak all the grounds. Place the lid on the press, but resist the temptation to plunge immediately. Go back to Twitter. Or switch to Instagram.
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Here’s What You’ll Need:
If Your Favourite Coffee Is Espresso
Brewing espresso at home can be difficult. However, there are a few tips to optimise your home espresso.
Pick your coffees wisely. Although youll find light and dark roasts that make a great espresso, a medium roast can be a safe option. Sometimes a light roast is too acidic and a dark roast can taste bitter. Alternatively, look for coffee which is specially roasted for espresso.
Coffee needs to degas after roasting, and due to the high levels of pressure used in brewing an espresso, you need to wait for the coffee to degas before you brew it at home. Most suggest at least a week, Lyndon suggests even at least 10 days after roasting date and sometimes more.
Andrés Guevara Chaves, co-founder of El Purica Speciality Coffee Roasters in Germany, highlights the importance of grinding for espresso and suggests that a good grinder is more important than a machine. This is because espresso requires a fine grind. The consistency in this fine grind is crucial to a good extraction, as the water flow will be highly impacted if the grind is not consistent.
Bear in mind that every coffee needs a different grind you cant simply follow one rule for each one. While there is no rule set in stone, a good extraction time to aim for is between 2530 seconds. You should also ensure that your shot roughly follows the brew ratio of 1:2, with a brewed coffee weight around double of the dry dose, for example, 18g of dry coffee brewing around 36g of brewed coffee.
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Top 10 Tips For Better French Press Coffee At Home
Undoubtedly, the beauty of a French Press Coffee Maker is its simplicity. Whether you’re in a rush to get to work or simply eager to start the day off right, you can use the French Press to brew a cup of coffee in just a few minutes time. Not only is the Coffee Press a classic way to brew coffee, but it can truly produce a delicious cup as long as you play your cards right.
If you to enjoy the perfect cup of Joe every morning, here are Top 10 Tips for making delicious French Press Coffee at home.
How Long Should French Press Coffee Steep
To recap from the instructions above, we first pour in a small amount of boiling water, stir, and wait. Then we pour in the remaining water and stir again, and wait.3-4 minutes is the optimal window of time to get an average strength cuppa out of a coffee press.
If you prefer lighter coffee, finish the batch off a bit early. If youre a fan of stronger stuff, give it more time. However, I wouldnt give it TOO much time, as you may ruin the coffee by allowing it to over-extract and get bitter.
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How Much Coffee To Use In French Press
- How Much Coffee To Use In French Press
How Much Coffee To Use In French Press. The 10 best french press coffee makers in 2020 reviewed. If you are interested in making multiple cups of coffee, you need to multiply this ratio.
Again, depending on how strong you want the coffee to be, go with between 10 and 12 tablespoons of coffee for a 32 oz french press. How much coffee do you put in a 32 oz french press? 65 gram per liter is 14.7 grams per 8 oz.
Source: coffee-brewing-methods.com
Again, depending on how strong you want the coffee to be, go with between 10 and 12 tablespoons of coffee for a 32 oz french press. To brew your french press at full capacity find the french press in the image above the is most similar to yours.
Source: www.labelsandlacquer.com
To brew your french press at full capacity find the french press in the image above the is most similar to yours. The smaller the ratio the stronger the brew, and you can use that as a guideline.
Source: melmagazine.com
For the french press, use 2 tbsp per 6 oz of water. This means if you have 1 gram of coffee you would want to have 15 grams of water.
Source: members.rssmasher.com
Pin on coffee brewing guide you might immediately think the answer. This means if you have 1 gram of coffee you would want to have 15 grams of water.
Source: coffeedrinker.net
The ideal french press coffee ratio is 1:12. That is to say, 1 gram of coffee for 10 grams of water.
Source: www.bsiarchivalhistory.org
Play With Your Brew Recipe
It is always good to have a starting point, so follow suggested brew recipes and ratios. Look into what these are from this article, or look around for alternatives. But remember, its always down to you and your taste preferences. Learn from the process and enjoy it.
A cup of black coffee. Credit: Jean Pierre Flores
A good cup of coffee can brighten up your day. Luckily, you can brew a great cup yourself, at home. Not only can you enjoy the drink itself but also begin to understand the science behind brewing, how different coffees taste, and what you like and why.
Its time to discover coffee origins, create your own opinions, and most importantly, sit down and enjoy your delicious cup of coffee.
Written by Helena Brown. Featured photo caption: Filter coffee being poured into a cup. Featured photo credit: Jean Pierre Flores
Perfect Daily Grind
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What Is French Press Coffee
The first time you set out to make French press coffee, just the sight of the French press coffee maker can be a little intimidating. But it’s actually one of the simplest brewing systems, and it’s been around since the 1850s. According to legend, its invention was actually a happy accident.
The story goes that a Frenchman was boiling water when he realized he had forgotten to put the coffee in. He decided to add the coffee grounds to the boiling water nonetheless. Once the coffee grounds rose to the top, he used a piece of metal screen and a stick to press the screen down together with the grounds. The result? It was the best coffee he had ever tasted.
Despite this fun origin story, the patent of the French press coffee maker actually came from the Italians. With time, the version has continued to evolve into the French press we know today or a manual brewing system in which coffee grounds are steeped in hot water before being pressed to the bottom of the beaker, helping to separate the grounds from the liquid.
Start With Delicious Water
Coffee is 98 percent water, Moore says, so it makes sense that your water should taste good. But that doesnt mean hiking out to your nearest natural spring or paying loads to buy fancy water.
If you want to use tap water, the real rule of thumb is to drink it first. If it tastes OK to you, go ahead and use it, says Shawn Steiman, author of the forthcoming book The Little Coffee Know-It-All.
Tap leaving a bad taste in your mouth? Grab the filtered or bottled water instead. We love water.
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French Press Coffee Ratio
We recommend a water to coffee ratio of 16:1 to 12:1 depending on the coffee and your preference. This means 16 grams of water for every gram of coffee. To calculate how much coffee you need, weigh the amount of water you want to brew and divide that by 16. That will give you the amount of coffee to grind.
How Long To Brew French Press Coffee
The sweet spot for brewing coffee in a French press is something around 4 minutes. I find that if I want a really strong cup of coffee, 5 minutes is perfect, and if I want it lighter I can do 3 minutes and get exactly what I want.
You will likely need to experiment to find exactly how you like your coffee. Start with 4 minutes and adjust from there.
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Should You Use A Coffee Grinder
I do recommend using a coffee grinder. Once youve bought those great coffee beans from your local coffee roaster, youll want to grind your own coffee beans at home. This keeps your coffee beans even fresher and it will taste even better when you are brewing that coffee.
There are a lot of coffee grinders out there, but the main difference is whether its a burr or electric grinder. I wrote an article about the differences between the two, if youre interested in reading it, I suggest .
For this brewing guide, youll want to use quite a bit of coffee beans. I made a neat table to show you how much coffee beans youre going to need:
| The total amount of brewed coffee: | Amount of coffee needed: |
| 80 grams | 4 cups |
Most of the time, this ratio of coffee to water is enough to get you an amazing tasting cup of joe, however if you feel like youre not satisfied with the taste you can change the ratio to your liking:
- Use more coffee beans to get a stronger tasting cup of coffee
- Use more water to dilute the coffee a bit, if you feel like the coffee tastes too strong. Or you can use less coffee beans.
When experimenting with brewing coffee at home, its all about trial and error. Eventually, youll find your sweet spot for the different coffee to water ratios of the many coffee brewers out there.
If you dont want to get a coffee grinder or you dont feel like using one every time you are going to brew a cup of coffee, you can ask your coffee roaster to grind the coffee beans for you.
The Best Coffee Beans For French Press
Start by selecting the right type of bean for your French pressdarker roasts tend to win for this style of coffee. Then note that the freshness of your beans will impact the flavor in your freshly pressed cup of joe. Coffee can technically go bad by losing its flavor if not stored properlystore your coffee in a container with UV-light blocking technology.
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Coffee Science: How To Make The Best French Press Coffee At Home
- Pin
A French press is often treated like Jason Segal’s character in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. He’s actually the one you want, but people tend to flock blindly to the flashy, temperamental types like coffee-siphon-somethings or Russell Brands. The French press is definitely a potential coffee happily-ever-after, but as with all things coffee, it ain’t rocket science… but it is science! Let’s delve a little deeper into how the French press works, and how you can make the best cup of coffee using this tool.
The French press, also called the cafetiere or coffee press, is a cylinder-shaped beaker with a plunger. The piston of the plunger is made of mesh, allowing liquid to flow through it but not the larger coffee grounds.
With some coffee-brewing methods, the amount of brewed coffee you’re trying to make and the grind size of your beans will affect how quickly the water will flow through the coffeeand how long your total brew time will be. This is true for drip brewing, pourover, and even espresso.
As you may recall from our discussion of the pourover method, I like to talk about coffee brewing as having three general phases: wetting, dissolution, and diffusion.
“In our low-and-slow French press, you’re not adding more water in as you go, so the energy driving diffusion is decreased, resulting in slower, more gradual brewing.”
The Ideal French Press Coffee Grind
When it comes to coffee grind size, there is a lot of debate among French Press lovers. Some like it very coarse, while others opt for a finer grind . Heres what we think works best:
The ideal french press coffee grind should be a coarse grind, similar in consistency to kosher salt. You dont want to have a very fine grind for French Press due to the infusion process.
Since you need to leave your coffee steeping, a fine grind will extract the coffee too quickly, whereas a very coarse grind, too slowly. You want to aim for something in between.
If you still prefer a very coarse grind, you need to adjust the steep time to around 6-8 minutes, instead of the usual 4 minutes.
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Choose The French Press Thats Right For You
Take some time to find the French press that will suit you and your home the best.
Glass carafes are very popular and no doubt stylish, but they are the most fragile. Metal is more robust and will stand the test of time a little longer.
Also consider the climate in your area. If you live somewhere cool, you may want to choose a metal or ceramic carafe as they retain heat for longer too – take the Sterling Pro as a great example of a French press coffee maker with a metal carafe.
Size is also important. Will you be sharing your best brew with many others or is it just you and a loved one or two? Small French presses serve three to four cups and large ones accommodate eight to twelve. The Bodum Chambourd is a popular choice and comes in both sizes.
Do remember that cup size is sometimes smaller than you might expect. In this guide, we will take you through brewing with 200ml servings.