How to Cup Coffee
So, the first thing you need is a kettle. Expensive kettles don’t matter, cheap kettles, not necessarily gooseneck, ordinary household kettle is fine too. Make sure you fill it with fresh cold water. The next thing you will need is a scale, and you want to weigh both coffee and water with it, so something accurate to 0.1 grams is ideal. Next you'll need a coffee grinder. Now, in our ideal world, you'd want a grinder designed to grind whatever you put in it, that doesn't retain any coffee. If you have a grinder that retains coffee, and you have a hand grinder in this case, a hand grinder might be better. And then you need some kind of spoon. Now it could be something like a teaspoon, they are designed for coffee, but it's not really necessary, it's perfectly fine to use a dessert spoon or a soup spoon.
And then we need something to brew in. Now the industry uses what they call cupping bowls. It's nothing special, it's nothing out of the ordinary, it's basically a sugar bowl. It’s a bowl of about 250 mils in volume and that's it. You don't necessarily have to use something like that but if you have them and a lot of them that's great, but you can use tempered glass if you want, a lot of people like to use those. But if you don't have those, you can make it in a regular mug. That's fine and it might even be a pretty big cup, but you'll have to make some changes and tweak your recipe a bit as you do. But ideally all you need is the five or six of the same size, and you know how big they are. The the last thing you need is coffee. Now, I have to be clear here, what you don't have to do is this, you don't have to buy three, four, five, six bags full of different coffees. You can get away with a small amount, for example, 20 grams of a particular coffee, and that should be enough for you to have a cup.
Now, the ideal number I would say if you're just starting out, might be four or five. I wouldn't try 10 different samples if you are just starting out with drinking coffee side by side. Three is enough, two is enough actually for a pleasant learning experience, but I think four or five is really best. Just do what you need to do to get four or five small samples of coffee to taste, go talk to your local coffee shop, lots of them want to talk to you if you're passionate about tasting coffee, and you just want a few grams to brew it. If you have friends who buy a good coffee, trade with them, there are many different ways to do it, but all you need is a few different coffees. This is really the key. So let's talk about how you're going to brew for your cup of coffee. First, we want to have the least human interaction with coffee making. What we don't want to do is brew coffee in such a way that our technique can affect the taste. Pour-over is great, but the way you brew can make it sweeter or more tart.
So when do you taste the pour-over? And when do you enjoy your coffee? The other big idea behind this is scalability. Making five pours will not only take time, but it will also be really boring, even less trying to do 10 or 20. We need to make many types of coffee at once, and that is really easy. So what is the method? Well, it couldn't be simpler. We'll grind some coffee, fine to medium, put said coffee in you cup and pour hot water over it. Let it soak for about four minutes, like a French press. Then there will be a crust forming on the top, and we will stir after four minutes, we will clear out whatever is floating, and then we will have a coffee bowl or a cup of coffee, ready to drink. So, the important factors here are formulas and ratios. Now I would suggest a rate of 60 grams per liter. Now, generally for infusion brew like this, I would recommend 75 grams per liter, but here the slightly weaker brew actually makes the tasting process a little easier. And then you have the formula, right? So, if you have a bowl of 240, 250 mils, you don't want to use 240, 250 mils of water.
You want to use 200 and that would be 12 grams of coffee, and when you brew those 12 grams of coffee, it will expand. A foam will appear, and it will swell. This volume is usually three to four times the volume of coffee. And that's going to change a little bit. For 12 grams easily take 40 mils, plus 200 equals a very full bowl in a 240-mil bowl. If you don't have five or six cups or bowls. You have two choices, either choose the smallest size, this case is 10 grams to 160 and do it in all the containers, or you can increase and decrease. It's twice the size, so I have 20 grams in about 330 grams of water. The choice is yours, what suits you best.
Now when it's time to weigh the beans, weigh them in the container you'll pour into later, it's just an easy way to keep them organized while you prepare. I'd say you want to be accurate to ideally your target weight, plus or minus 0.1 grams. So if I want 12 grams here, that's 11.9 to 12.1, that's my window. After grinding, weight again, because you may have lost some coffee into the grinder.
Also, before you grind your main sample of a particular coffee, grind only a handful of small beans, just to make sure there is nothing left over from the previous coffee in that grinder, once done, once you've weighed all of your beans, hide the bags. What you don't want is some kind of prompts or lingering flavor note that affects you when you taste it. So write down what's what, get rid of them. There will be a chance to smell the coffee before tasting it. but you don't need to take a lot of notes, you don't have to find dozens of words to describe everything. Don't worry. Let's move on to brewing. Now your going to mix on the scale because you’re mixing three different recipes of 12 grams, 15 and 20, and you’ll have to mix the correct weight accordingly. And it's really hard to brew regularly without a scale, even in the same bowl of the same volume of coffee, some coffees can brew more than others. So zero without, add your hot water. Be cautious because it might be a bit hot.
Now set a timer for four minutes. After four minutes we will take a spoon, and we will use it to stop the brewing process. We will gently stir the top crust three times, and that will sink most of the bottom soil. You will then take a second spoon, to scrape off whatever is still floating on top, leaving a clean bowl ready to enjoy. Again, in the industry, you'll notice that people smell really intently, when they stir that crust. It's an interesting aroma release moment, but if you're new to coffee tasting, don't worry too much. It's fun and it's appealing, but don't obsess over that kind of detail. The coffee industry has a lot of other priorities around tasting than we do at home. And now your coffee is ready to taste, they're a little too hot.
I recommend waiting at least 10 minutes to let them cool down. Right now they're not just so hot they're burning your tongue, but they can barely taste when they're so hot. Coffee tasting becomes easier as the coffee cools. Use this cooling time to clean up your space and by the time you’re done its ready. Go get that notebook, drink a glass of water, and get ready. And now finally, it's time to taste. So the spoon, the spoon is there so we can just have a little sample of coffee, and don't need a cup of hot liquid, that's all. This allows us to do one more thing, which is the slurp the coffee. You will see coffee experts making a series of amazingly weird noises as they slurp. It increases flavors that you taste.
Rinse a little spoon between bowls, and keep tasting, comparing, and contrasting, that's the game here. Make sure you keep tasting from warm to room temperature. Coffees will change a lot during this time, and they will become easier to drink. That basically it, just think about what you like, what you don't like. Once you get used to the process, we will enhance your taste buds and develop your taste for coffee.