Stella, this is not directed AT you, it is just a way to get it onto the board under the topic. This is my first post here and I am just learning how things are done. Thank you for understanding.
People who have taken Chemistry or physics know about
something called STP -- Standard Temperature and Pressure. Where I live
water 'boils' at an average about 198 degrees F, so I'm at the bottom end
of the extraction temperature -- and could only get to true 'boiling' (212 F) n
a pressure cooker. If a storm is coming it boils at a lower temperature,
and if we have a high pressure area, it boils at a higher temp, but never 212
F.
And Now we come to an important concept -- it's usually applied to pasta, but
applies to anything you eat: it's called "al dente' -- meaning 'to the
tooth' -- or in a more general translation, how you like something
cooked. There are snobs everywhere -- and it seems that Pasta has given
way to Coffee as the new 'in' snobbery. I'm Italian - and Pasta to me is
anywhere from a substantial 'bite' to get into the pasta, to my 'comfort
food' -- Pasta cooked until reasonably soft, left in the hot water for a
bit, strained, never rinsed (it's just been in water! what's to rinse off
except flavor?) and then covered in olive oil, a little butter, some FRESH
ground black pepper, and some very good hard Italian cheese ground fresh -
the pasta is soggy, the flavors exceptional --
and it is EXACTLY to MY TOOTH, that is, it is PERFECT FOR ME!
Now to coffee -- There are three parts to coffee: freshness and type, size of
the grind, and length of the brew.
Freshness and Type. I happen to have a mouth that likes fresh coffee that
is dark, oily, has the taste of smoke, and a tad of bitterness. The
darker the bean, the more oil on the bean, the happier I am -- Black over
Brown. Dark Brown over Light Brown, I like my coffee ground to a
powder - that is, for a 'Turkish' coffee -- finer grind than even
espresso. I prefer to use an unbleached paper filter -- the outside cone
comes in many sizes from large many cup to small one cup. I use a small
one cup, and put a number two Melitta filter inside a number six Melitta
filter, and fill the number two filter and give it a small tamp to increase
brew time. I put about 500ml -- call it 2 cups of water -- into a
microwave and bring it to a simmer, and fill the number two cone with
water, it then flattens out and catches the wall of the outside
cone. I tend to add water about three to four times during the brewing
process. each time reheating the water and pouring it into the cooling
water in the cone. What goes in is about 175ml of whole beans turned to
power in a slow burr mill, that produces in the neighborhood of 4 ounces volume
(about 120ml) of powdered coffee when tamped just a bit. I lose about 1/2
cup of water to the coffee and paper (again about 120ml). What comes out
the bottom of the filter is a cup and a half (about 380ml) of coffee so dark
you cannot see light through it, which has a tad of bitterness attached to it
-- and which has extracted nearly all the caffeine and flavors that can come
out of that coffee. And leaves behind many of the bitter alkaloids.
In fact, brewed coffee has more caffeine than
espresso, a fact lost on many because they equate the ‘strength’ of coffee with
the flavor of ‘bitter’.
I use the one cup Melitta cone so I don't brew coffee too fast, or allow the
water to cool too much. It keeps the larger outside cone from collapsing
as one person pointed out that it did when they went too fast -- and sometimes
I've had the catastrophic failure in the same way -- I was in too much of
a hurry – however, what I get in return for about 5 minutes of paying attention
to the process, is one cup of coffee that keeps me flying all day -- and which
is 'perfect' to MY mouth, not necessarily yours.
Some things ARE true -- Coffee beans are full of chemicals -- and to extract
some chemicals and not others you need to have a certain size of particle, a
certain amount of 'brew' time, and a certain temperature of water. One
reason espresso tastes so bitter to some is that the temperature of the water
used is FAR higher than boiling, and this allows some chemicals known as Alkaloids,
to dissolve in the hotter water. It's why brewing coffee with very tepid
water will produce a weak brownish liquid that you could read a large type
flyer through, perhaps even a newspaper. Some people like coffee like
that, to keep the coffee taste 'fresh' and not remove very much caffeine and
not remove any of the alkaloids that make coffee taste bitter. Some
people enjoy instant coffee, others enjoy the bulk cans of coffee you can buy
at supermarkets, and others find them both a 'coffee like beverage'.
Everyone can be right. There ARE people who set up guide lines
which say that if you want to compare one kind of coffee to another, you should
use certain guidelines -- you need a level playing field and thus they chose
certain criteria that allows the differences in coffee to be tasted across
different brands and types of coffee. Some African coffees are dark,
bitter, and are super charged with caffeine -- if they are brewed that way,
some Latin American coffees are a very pleasant brown, do not have the bitter
bite of African coffees, and tend to have a mild flavor. Pacific Coffees
tend to have more 'smoke' or 'earth' to their flavors -- but if you did not
make a standard way to make a cup of coffee it would be hard to tell. And
roasting your own coffee can turn a black coffee brown or a brown coffee black,
all beans are green, what you do after that determines the kind and taste of
the bean. One bean may have many different flavors depending on how it is
brewed. But to compare coffee, you need a ‘standard’, which is just a ‘norma
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