Starts with the right coffee bean: The Best Coffee is Made From Grade A Arabica Beans.
- Choose coffee made from Grade A Arabica beans.
- Choose coffee that has been recently roasted. This is the most important element – coffee tastes the best within one month after roasting.
- Smell the coffee beans – a strong smell indicates fresh beans.
- Invest in a coffee grinder and buy whole beans. Grind your coffee immediately before brewing. Once the coffee is ground, the flavor dissipates more quickly. We highly recommend investing in a burr grinder.
- When buying decaffeinated coffees, look for coffees that have been decaffeinated using the Swiss Water Process.
- Storage is integral to maintaining your coffee's freshness and flavor. It is important to keep it away from excessive air, moisture, heat, and light -- in that order -- in order to preserve its fresh-roast flavor as long as possible.
- Coffee beans are decorative and beautiful to look at but you will compromise the taste of your coffee if you store your beans in ornamental, glass canisters on your kitchen countertop. Doing so will cause them to become stale and your coffee will quickly lose its fresh flavor.
- It is important not to refrigerate or freeze your daily supply of coffee because contact with moisture will cause it to deteriorate.
- Instead, store coffee in air-tight glass or ceramic containers and keep it in a convenient, but dark and cool, location. Remember that a cabinet near the oven is often too warm, as is a cabinet on an outside wall of your kitchen if it receives heat from a strong afternoon or summer sun.
- The commercial coffee containers that you purchased your coffee in are generally not appropriate for long-term storage. Appropriate coffee storage canisters with an airtight seal are a worthwhile investment.
How to Make Coffee:
- Begin with freshly roasted coffee beans.
- Grind the beans right before brewing.
- Use filtered water.
- Ideally use a French press, although you’ll get a good cup of coffee from a drip maker too.
- Use approximately 1 rounded tablespoon of coffee per 8 oz. of water, to your taste.
Brew, and serve!
If you want Decaf, always purchase coffee decaffeinated by the Swiss Water Process:
In this decaffeinating method, green coffee beans soak in hot water to draw off the caffeine. The resulting solution, which contains caffeine as well as other flavor and aroma elements, is separated from the beans and sent through a bed of activated charcoal to remove the caffeine. Next, the water containing the remaining flavor compounds is returned to the beans. The beans are then dried. The coffee industry often refers to this decaffeinating method as "Swiss Water Process" because a Swiss company originally developed and patented the procedure. No chemicals are used in this method.
