Brewing is subjective, different people are looking for different things. It’s my belief that if a coffee is roasted well, there are many ways to brew that will all taste good in different ways. Nothing in this brew guide should be taken prescriptively as the only way to brew minmax coffees to taste good!
Resting recommendations: As a roaster, you learn to brew even the lightest roasted coffees less than a day off roast – sometimes right out of the roaster – in order to get a quick idea of there’s something wrong with the way you roasted the coffee. I’ve noticed a fall off in how the coffee tastes between that first day and about 2-3 weeks in so I would not recommend brewing during that period, but I’m typically very impatient with bags of coffee just sitting around! So I like to start brewing at 2-3 weeks, though it’s definitely better if you wait until 4-5 weeks – or maybe even longer.
On the other end, minmax coffee roasts should still be tasty up to about 3 months after roasting, if you’re a lot more patient of a person than me!
Filter Coffee
My standard starting point for my coffees uses the following:
- A plastic v60 01 with Cafec Abaca filters
- Baratza Vario with steel burrs
- Water with 60GH from Calcium Chloride Anhydrous, 10GH from Epsom salt, 40KH buffer from baking soda
- 12.5g coffee, 200g water between 91 and 93C
- Coffee rested somewhere between two weeks and three months
Directions:
- Pour 40g water about every 30 seconds, or as soon as the water above the coffee bed is looking thin. Full send water as fast as your kettle allows at the bed. Repeat 5 times. Your grind size should be coarse enough that your total brew time should be between about 2:45 and 4 minutes, although I tend to aim for around the 3 minute mark. As with all things, dial by taste, not by following the recipe!
Espresso:
I haven’t tried making espresso seriously in about two years. All I can say is, people seem to enjoy pulling turbos with my coffees. It’s probably best to ask someone more qualified than me.