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Express Night Out | Arts & Events | The Coolest Beans: The District’s Top Iced Coffee

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A Fresh Experiment

A couple of folks from the Washingtonian Magazine stopped by this morning for an informal coffee tasting. I wanted to impress upon them the true meaning of freshness. So last night, I ran a little experiment. I ground three batches of the same bean an hour apart, so that I had one coffee brewed from just ground beans, one with beans that had been ground an hour previous and another 2 hours previous.

Three cups of Kenyan, fresh ground, one hour old, and two hours old.

I was a little disappointed that I could not tell much of a difference between the three cups. Luckily, just then my girlfriend stopped by the shop. Unaware that the cups were all the same coffee, I asked her to try them and tell me what she thought. She identified a distinct brightness in the fresh ground cup, a creaminess in the one hour cup and thought the third tasted relatively flat.

I decided to go ahead and test it out on my visitors this morning. Interestingly, the one who was a seasoned coffee drinker had a hard time telling much difference between the cups while the other, not a big coffee drinker, noticed more differences. The result was a mixed bag, but I hope that I got my point across, namely that the flavor of coffee is dynamic and noticeably affected by its freshness.

Brew Ha Ha

I have been doing a little pre-spring cleaning and recently pulled out my collection of coffee brewing tools, which has grown quite a bit over the past couple of years. The bulk of the collection is made up of a selection of plastic and porcelain pour-overs, the type of cone-shaped filter holder that sits on top of a mug or carafe. I also have a selection of more exotic devices such as a couple of syphon pots, an AeroPress (so named because it is marketed by the same company that puts out the Aerobee flying disc) and an Eva Solo. There are also other popular brewers such as the French press and the Moka Pot (a.k.a. stove-top espresso).

So what’s your favorite way to brew coffee?

New Category

I am enjoying a much needed beach vacation this week, but I have been reminded of a new category I have been meaning to launch: Coffee Tragedies. Being an unrepentant coffee snob in a world of coffee troglodytes, there is seldom a day that goes by when I don’t witness some tragic waste of beans. But ever so often I comes across such a heinous crime committed in the name of coffee, that it seems worth recording so that future historians can look back and understand why our civilization was doomed to failure. But I hyperbolize (only a little).

While I admire the attempt to offer variety (although almost certainly many of these are flavored coffees) this is no way to treat any self-respecting brew.

A Baker's Dozen

Keepin’ Cool

With temperatures peaking at close to 100 degrees, this seems like a really good time to roll out some recipes for ice coffee. I have been using both the below methods to produce pleasing cups of ice coffee:

Cold brewing is a great way to make large quantities of concentrated coffee. It makes a really rich and bold cup of coffee that goes great with a little milk. This coffee concentrate has a fairly long shelf life of four to five days, if refrigerated.

Generally, I am making large quantities of this brew, enough for a couple dozen cups, although each cup only takes about 4-5 ounces of coffee, the rest being made up of ice. As with other brewing techniques, it pays to play with the amount of coffee you are using, but my current formula is to use about 2.5 ounces of coffee per pint of water. I also prefer to use glass jar for steeping the coffee. The coffee should be ground very course, even more coarsely than for a French press, if possible. The grounds will be brewing for hours, so they will have plenty of time to absorb water despite the limited surface area. Stir the grounds well to make sure that they are thoroughly wetted. You can expect a lot of expansion initially and you should leave the lid loose as the coffee will continue releasing CO2 that will need to escape as it steeps. Place the steeping coffee into a refrigerator or cool spot for around 12 hours.

Once the steep time is up, straining the coffee can be a slow and arduous, and until you work out a good system, messy as well. I suggest doing this in stages. I have used both a cloth canning strainer and a regular metal kitchen strainer to do the initial filtering. If you let the resulting liquid sit for a few minutes, a lot of the fines will drop to the bottom of the container forming a sort of muddy paste. I then pour the brew through a manual drip cone (the more holes the better, see drip coffee above) with a metal filter. Finally, I filter it one more time through a paper filter. It can take a half hour or more for the coffee to drip through on this last step, so you may want to go off and do something else while gravity does its work. I should probably mention at this point, that there are a couple of brewers designed to take a lot of the effort out of this process. Toddy and Filtron both make equipment for cold brewing that stores the steeping coffee and allows you to filter out the brew at the end. These can be bulky and are definitely pricier than the DYI method, but can also reduce the potential messiness.

With the cold brew ready, fill a glass all the way up with ice and pour over the coffee and enjoy.

For a less time-consuming approach, ice coffee can also be hot brewed. A lot of restaurants and coffee shops will prepare their coffee normally and then place it in the refrigerator, to be poured over ice when needed. This is, however, not the preferred method for brewing ice coffee. Instead, I recommend brewing concentrated coffee directly over ice, not unlike you would get in a Vietnamese restaurant, but without the sweetened condensed milk (unless you are into that kind of thing).

For hot brewing, you want to fill a container of known capacity about 3/4 full of ice. Using the pour-over method outlined earlier, increase the recommend the dose of coffee by about 20%, based on the capacity of your container. The idea is to make a really strong cup of coffee, since the melting ice will get mixed in with it. I find it preferable to use a glass vessel, a jar or glass, so that I can see how much coffee is filling the container. The hot coffee will melt most of the ice, so if I a making a glass to drink immediately, I leave some room at the top to add more ice cubes after brewing.

The hot-brew technique actually gives you a very different flavor profile than the cold brew. While the cold brew is bold and flavorful, it lacks a lot of the complexity of hot brewed coffee. By contrast, the hot brewed ice coffee will be much brighter and exhibit some of the more subtle tones of the coffee.

French Press

From our ongoing series on brewing techniques, we bring you THE FRENCH PRESS.

The French press allows for some improvisation by giving the user total control over the time, temperature and, to some extent, the grinding level. Unlike in the drip method, in a French press, you are steeping the grounds; all the water is in contact with the coffee during brewing, usually around 4 minutes. Some people like to steep longer or shorter, use slightly finer or courser grounds. Such choices are largely a matter of personal taste and require experimentation. The finer the grounds, the more sediment you will have in your cup. However, by depressing the plunger slowly, you can minimize that. The screens on most French presses allow for only the finest of grounds to filter through, but slight larger pieces can escape around the edges if you push down fast enough to produce air bubbles. In terms of choosing grind level, the flavor rules I laid out above are even more relevant here. The finer you go the brighter and more citrusy will be the brew, while a course grind will begin to blunt those flavors, but yield more body.

Brewing with a French press requires a little more coffee than drip. For example, for one liter of water, I would use 57 grams or 8 scoops, to brew drip coffee. By comparison, for one liter of water in a French press, I would use 65 grams or 9-10 scoops of coffee. It is essential to use enough coffee or you will end up with weak, under-flavored coffee. Using very fresh coffee, ie. beans roasted within a few days, will release a lot of CO₂ when the hot water hits it, so be prepared to stir the resulting froth down a bit and keep adding water gradually until you hit the fill point. With really fresh beans, it may help to cut down on how much the brew froths up by grinding the beans 10 to 15 minutes before adding water. You may also want to warm up the press before adding the coffee or water as the water will cool once mixed with the grounds themselves. Once the press is warmed up, dump out the water you were using to warm it up (you can pour it into your carafe if you will be using one), add the grounds, then start pouring your hot water over the grounds. As always, the water should be between 195-205 degrees Fahrenheit. Stir the mix, and keep adding water as the froth settles. Remember to leave enough head room to insert the plunger, which should keep a little more of the heat in. Start the clock as soon as the grounds are thoroughly wetted. Steep time should be around 4 minutes.

At the sound of the bell, start pushing down on the plunger. As mentioned above, depressing the plunger slowly is key to keeping grounds out of your cup. This can take 30 seconds or more. Once the plunger is down, little brewing is occurring, but I still like to transfer the coffee to a separate, preheated carafe.

Drip, Drip, Drip

I have been working on a Comprehensive Guide to Brewing Coffee. Actually, I have been working on it for some time now, but am waiting until I have it entirely done before publishing the guide on my web site. But, since it is taking me so long, I have decided to release it here in the piecemeal fashion in which it is coming together. So, here is the first installment on brewing by the manual drip method. I use this method quite a lot and in many variations.

In fact, tomorrow, I will be starting up the market season again and will be using a somewhat unique device, an open mesh filter holder, that lets me brew a single cup relatively fast. The problem with brewing coffee this way, is you are trading speed for full-bodied flavor. On the upside, this approach emphasizes the brightness of the coffee, if that is to your taste. I go into more detail in the guide, so I will let that document speak for itself.

Manual Drip

Although it is one of the easiest methods to master, the manual drip or pour over also gives you a lot of room to improvise. I recommend starting out with a plastic filter holder. Unlike the porcelain cones, plastic doesn’t retain heat and so doesn’t need to be warmed up before brewing. That removes one step while you are developing your technique. Eventually, porcelain will be the way to go and generally porcelain cones feature better flow, are easy to clean and offer more heat stability. When shopping for a filter holder, it’s preferable to have one with more than one hole and enough internal ribbing to hold the filter away from the sides of the cone. You should also make sure that it fits into the carafe into which you will be brewing the coffee. I recommend a glass-lined vacuum carafe. They are relatively inexpensive, don’t react with the coffee (unlike stainless steel) and really hold in heat. Once you have your pour-over cone and carafe picked out, it is time to decide on a filter. The most common types are made from paper, metal, cotton and hemp. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages. I prefer metal because it is both reusable and allows a lot of the coffee flavor oils to pass through. I also frequently use paper because it allows less of the finer grounds to pass through and offers easy clean up. You also need a kettle to heat up your water and a measuring cup to portion it out. As mentioned above, the water should be between 195 and 205 degrees for brewing. You can achieve this by boiling the water and then letting it cool slightly. The time it takes to cool a few degrees really depends on how much water you boiled, the size and how much heat your kettle retains. It can take anywhere from thirty seconds to several minutes. However, if you are using a glass measuring cup, that itself will cool the water by several degrees on contact. If the your coffee taste sour, most likely your water is not hot enough.

Now that you have your equipment in place and water near boil, it’s time to grind up your fresh coffee beans. This should be done within a minute or two of when you start brewing. The exception to that rule is if you are using beans that have been roasted within 48 hours. In that case you can grind the beans 5 to 10 minutes before brewing to allow them to off gas a little bit first. As long as you are using relatively fresh beans, ie those that are less than 3 weeks old, you should expect a significant amount of blooming when you begin to pour hot water over the grounds. The sudden heating of the beans releases a small explosion of CO₂ gas, which puffs up the grounds in the filter basket. When using an auto-drip machine, you would not see this bloom, but it is one of the main reasons I don’t like using such a machine. If you are using fresh beans (and why would you do otherwise) the bloom can cause the grinds to back up into the machine’s shower head. I suspect a lot of people compensate by reducing the amount of coffee they use or using too course a setting on the grinder. In fact, one of the most common mistakes people make (besides not using fresh beans) is using too little coffee. The Specialty Coffee Association of America recommends using 10 grams of coffee per cup (6 ounces). For those of you without a gram scale, a one tablespoon coffee scoop measures out, on average 7 grams, of light or medium roasted coffee. A dark roast coffee will be notably lighter due to water loss and bean expansion. An Italian roast, for example, may weigh as little as 5 grams per scoop.

After the bloom has settled, carefully pour the rest of your water over the grounds so that they wet nice and evenly. The water should drain out of the grinds relatively slowly. Remember this is the pour-over method not the pour through method. If the water is pouring through the grounds, than you may have either used too little coffee or, if you are using a paper filter, it may have broken. However, controlling for those variables, the most likely problem is the grounds are too course. The manual drip method is actually pretty tolerant in terms of grind level, although it can have a substantial impact on the flavors extracted. In my experience, the finer the grind the sweeter and more citrusy the result. In contrast, a courser grind will yield a full bodied, more well rounded cup. The flavor you shoot for is largely a matter of personal preference, but it pays to play around with the grind level a bit depending on the flavors of particular beans.

Taming of the Brew

I am in the process of cobbling together a semi-comprehensive brew guide for my web site. (A preliminary version is now up.) As I am sure many of you have heard me say, my preferred brewing method is a manual pour-over. It is only slightly more work than using an auto-drip machine, but offers consistently superior results. However, that is not to say that this is the only method I use. I have used a number of methods including the Aeropress described below, which produced very good results during Erin’s recent trip. I have also been using a French press a lot lately and a similar brewer known as an Eva Solo. In the not-so-distant past, I have experimented with a stove-top brewer known as either a vacuum pot or coffee siphon, which is finicky but can produce phenomenal results in experienced hands. There are several methods with which I am less familiar as well, such as the mokka pot, a stove-top device in which steam forces the hot water through fine grounds producing a very potent brew. Each of these techniques has its own advantages and disadvantages. Each also extracts a different flavor profile from the beans, which is one of the things that makes coffee so interesting and exciting. With more than 700 flavor constituents in a good-quality coffee, you can always find new ways to stimulate your taste buds. So the adventure continues.

From left to right: Aeropress, Eva Solo, French press, Vacuum pot.

Coffee A-Go-Go

My girlfriend headed off to Chicago this morning on business. Planning for her trip, she faced the age old question: “What if I can’t find a decent coffee shop while I am away?” Okay, maybe it isn’t age old, but it is one that I have been mulling over for some time now, ever since Erin came back from Memphis complaining that she couldn’t find anything that had the caffeine kick she needed to get started in the mornings. Not wanting to take the blame again for having got her hooked on the high-octane stuff in the first place, I packed her off with a coffee kit containing several single-serving, air-tight vials of freshly roasted and ground coffee and a device called an Aeropress. The Aeropress (which gets it’s name in part from the fact that it is marketed by Aerobie, the company that started by selling those ring-type non-Frisbee brand frisbees) has the advantages of being not only portable and hand operated, but also capable of brewing at relatively low temperatures. The latter feature is important in case the only access you have to hot water is an hotel-room auto-drip coffee machine. If you read my first posting you know, the average coffee machine rarely produces water much above 185 degrees. I’ll be sure to let you know how it works out.