Tag: french press

Two Cup French Press

lpaulriddle

I have brewed mostly single cups of coffee in the French press, which, while it works, is better suited for something like the AeroPress. Today, I brewed a larger batch, which turned out pretty good:

  • Beans: “Harvest Moon” medium roast (Indonesia/South Asia)
    • Roaster: Zeke’s Coffee (Baltimore, MD)
    • Roast date: 10/30/2023
  • 40 grams coffee, 520 grams water (1:13 ratio)
  • French press
  • Gooseneck kettle
  1. Preheat French press
  2. Heat brew water to 95°C
  3. Coarse grind (JX setting 30, or 3 rotations)
  4. Start timer and pour at the same time
  5. Pour 100 grams or so of water and return kettle to base
  6. Swirl to get all the grounds wet, and bloom until 1:00
  7. Top up to 520 grams of water and stir slowly a few times
  8. Steep for 6 more minutes, plunge, and pour

This recipe is kind of a testament to the fact that it’s hard to screw things up with a French press. I bet it would taste good with or without a separate bloom, with or without stirring/swirling, and regardless of total steep time (within reason). 6 minutes seems to be long enough to get good extraction without letting the coffee cool down too much.

11/21: This recipe tasted a little bitter this morning. Maybe try dropping the water temperature to 90°.

Vitality Brazil French Press

lpaulriddle

This afternoon’s cup:

  • Beans: “Brazil Yellow Bourbon” medium roast
    • Roaster: Vitality Roasting (Minneapolis, MN)
    • Roast date: 9/20/2023
  • 20 grams coffee, 280 260 grams water (1:14 1:13 ratio)
  • French press
  • Gooseneck kettle
  1. Preheat French press
  2. Heat brew water to 99°C
  3. Coarse grind (JX setting 30, or 3 rotations)
  4. Start timer and pour at the same time
  5. 60 second bloom (including pour time)
  6. Stir a few seconds until grounds settle
  7. Steep 6 minutes, plunge, and pour

This was a much better cup than yesterday’s. I kept everything the same, except I started with hotter water, and I remembered to preheat the French press. The result was a more robust, better extracted brew. I feel like it could have been a little bit stronger, so maybe 1:13 will be the sweet spot. The pourovers I’ve been making with these beans have been a little bit lackluster recently, so I may stick with the French press until I use them up.

In totally unrelated news, I was amazed with how quickly I bounced back from the COVID booster I got yesterday afternoon. The only symptoms I had were minor body aches last night and this morning, which disappeared after I took some Ibuprofen. This is in contrast to all of my previous shots, after which I had 24 to 36 hours of flu-like symptoms (aches, chills, shakes, fatigue, slightly elevated temperature). None of that this time around. The big difference: my past shots were all Moderna, and yesterday’s was Pfizer. I guess I must tolerate the Pfizer vaccine better.

10/5: Brewed again. Kept everything the same, except I reduced the water to 260g for a 1:13 ratio. This seemed like a good strength. I have enough beans left to brew about 3 more cups, and may just do all of them like this.

10/9: Used the beans up this afternoon. I had 26g left, so I used 338g of water (1:13). I believe this was the best cup I’ve gotten with them using this method. I didn’t do anything differently, so I wonder if it had something to do with the larger volume of water. I’m also wondering if the speed and/or length of time of stirring makes any difference in the finished product.

Morning Brew

lpaulriddle
  • Beans: “Angel Albino Corzo-Chiapa” medium roast (Mexico) from Amity Coffee Roasters in Greenwood, DE
  • 20 grams coffee, 280 grams water (1:14 ratio)
  • French press
  • Gooseneck kettle
  1. Preheat French press
  2. Heat brew water to 95°C
  3. Coarse grind (JX setting: 3 rotations + 4 clicks or 94 total clicks)
  4. Start timer and pour at the same time
  5. 60 second bloom (including pour time)
  6. Stir a few seconds until grounds settle
  7. Steep 6 minutes

This is my standard French press recipe, with slightly more water to get a 1:14 ratio vs 1:13. Just wanted to try it with these beans. The cup turned out fine, with more earthy and roasty notes than the pourover recipe I’ve been using. Overall, I think I prefer the pourover, but would be fine drinking this every day. Where the pourover (and AeroPress) win is convenience: both methods are faster and less messy than the French press.

Brew Notes (again)

lpaulriddle
  • Beans: Lost Dog “Mocha Sidamo” (dark roast)
  • 20 grams coffee, 260 grams water (1:13 ratio)
  • French press
  • Gooseneck kettle
  1. Preheat French press
  2. Heat brew water to 85°C
  3. Coarse grind (JX setting: 3 rotations + 4 clicks or 94 total clicks)
  4. Start timer and pour at the same time
  5. 60 second bloom (including pour time)
  6. Stir a few seconds until grounds settle
  7. Steep 6 minutes

I never thought I’d get to a point where I drink more than one cup of coffee a day, but lately I’ve been drinking two (one in the morning and one in the afternoon) mainly because I’m experimenting with so many different beans and recipes to find out what I like. I have had these beans for a couple of months, and I think I tried them in the French press soon after I bought the bag, but I didn’t take any notes here about how it turned out. This is my “standard” French press recipe, with the temperature knocked down to 85 for dark roast.

Two observations: #1, this was not nearly as strong-tasting a cup as the light roast that I brewed in the French press yesterday with the same parameters. It was good, but I bet it would be better at 1:11 or even 1:10. Next time, I’ll try using less water for a smaller but stronger cup. #2: With the lower initial water temperature and the long steep time, it wasn’t a very hot cup. It will lose even more heat if I brew with less water. I read somewhere where there’s less to extract out of dark roasted beans, so it may be that 6 minutes is longer than it needs to steep. I may try cutting back to 5 or even 4 minutes, to see if it has any noticeable effect on the finished product. I could also try a slightly higher initial water temperature (say 90°).

I think I am running up against one of the drawbacks to the French press — it’s not ideally suited to brewing single cups, because the long steep time leads to a lot of heat loss. This is not a huge deal if you start with boiling water, but starts to become an issue with lower initial brewing temperatures. So, I might want to stick with light to medium roasts with the French press. All the same, I think I’m going to eventually try these beans with 200 to 220 grams of 90° water and 4 to 5 minutes steep time, just to see how it turns out.

Brew Notes

lpaulriddle
  • Beans: Local Coffee Roasting Co. Breakfast Blend (light roast)
  • 20 grams coffee, 260 grams water (1:13 ratio)
  • French press
  • Gooseneck kettle
  1. Preheat French press
  2. Heat brew water to boil
  3. Coarse grind (JX setting: 3 rotations + 4 clicks or 94 total clicks)
  4. Start timer and pour at the same time
  5. 60 second bloom (including pour time)
  6. Stir a few seconds until grounds settle
  7. Steep 6 minutes

I’ve been getting a little bit frustrated with my AeroPress lately. I just seem to be unable to get consistently good results with it. One day I’ll brew something that is really good, and the next day I’ll brew the exact same beans with the exact same recipe, and it will be lackluster. I wish I could figure out what I’m doing when I get a good cup from it, and repeat it somehow.

On the flip side, we have the French press. It takes longer than the AeroPress, but I don’t think I’ve ever brewed a bad cup with it. For this one, I used the light roast beans I picked up last week in Bethany. I’ve used this exact French press recipe with lots of different beans. The only difference today was that because it’s a light roast, I used boiling water instead of 85-95°C water. The result was a rich, full-bodied, generally excellent cup. The only problem was that it was maybe a little too strong. I am feeling the caffeine more than I would like. The 1:13 ratio is stronger than the 1:18 I’ve been using with the AeroPress, but it may just be because it’s a 30% larger cup than what I usually make with the AP (260 vs 200 grams). I can see if I like it at 1:14 or 1:15, or just cut the volume down to 200 grams, which would call for about 15 grams of coffee to get a 1:13 ratio.

I may try out an AeroPress recipe like this one that uses a coarser grind which more closely mimics what I’ve been using with the French press, just to see what kind of results I get.

Brew Notes

lpaulriddle
  • Beans: German Street Coffee & Candlery Private House Blend
  • 20 grams coffee, 260 grams water (1:13 ratio)
  • French press
  • Gooseneck kettle
  1. Preheat French press
  2. Heat brew water to 95°C
  3. Coarse grind (JX setting: 3 rotations + 4 clicks or 94 total clicks)
  4. Start timer and pour at the same time
  5. 60 second bloom (including pour time)
  6. Stir a few seconds until grounds settle
  7. Steep 6 minutes

Prior to today, I had been pre-weighing my hot water by pouring it into a glass measuring cup, and then adding it to the French press all at once. Today, I just put the press on the scale and poured directly from the gooseneck kettle, which took 20-30 seconds, and then I let it steep/bloom until the timer hit 1 minute. Probably not much difference between the two methods, but I suspect there is less initial loss of water temperature with today’s method. The previous method allows for slightly more precise weighing, but all in all, I think today’s method is a little bit better, just because of the temperature thing. To be honest, a regular kettle without the gooseneck might be a better choice for the French press, especially if I’m brewing more than one cup. All that said, this produced a really tasty cup of coffee, which makes me happy, as I have had no luck at all with these beans with the Aeropress.

Today’s (cold) brew notes

lpaulriddle
  • Beans: German St Coffee & Candlery Private House Blend
  • Coarse grind (JX: 3 rotations + 4 clicks / 94 total clicks)
  • Recipe: https://www.acouplecooks.com/french-press-cold-brew
  • 140 grams coffee (roughly 2 cups ground), 840 grams water

With summer upon us, I decided to try making some cold brew. The hardest part of this was grinding 140 grams of coffee with the JX. This job would be better suited to a higher capacity electric grinder. Other than that, there’s not much to it: just add the ingredients to the french press, stir, cover with plastic wrap, refrigerate for 24 hours, and strain into a glass jar or pitcher. The resulting brew is concentrated, and the recipe recommends diluting 50/50 with either water or milk. I tried it with milk, and it was pretty good. Now, I need to work on trying to get a good cup of regular hot brew with these beans, but that’s for another day…

On an unrelated note, I just moved the back end database for this blog to a AWS RDS MariaDB instance. It had previously been running in a MariaDB Docker container on my old EC2 instance. This is the first step to getting my stuff off the EC2 instance and into (probably) EKS with Fargate. If you’re reading this, it means that it worked. 😀

Brew Notes

lpaulriddle
  • Beans: Lost Dog Coffee (Shepherdstown, WV) “La Esparanza” Organic Medium/Medium Dark (Nicaragua)
  • 0.75 oz coffee, 9.5 oz water (1:13 ratio)
  1. Preheat French press
  2. Heat brew water to 200°F
  3. Coarse grind (JX setting: 3 full rotations + 4 more clicks)
  4. Add all of the water at once, then start timer
  5. 30 second bloom
  6. Stir a few seconds until grounds settle
  7. Steep 6 minutes

I was having a hard time getting a good cup of coffee with these beans with the Aeropress, so I decided to try the French press and this turned out pretty good. Started timer after fairly slow pour from gooseneck kettle. Made a pretty strong cup. Might cut back to an 8 oz cup or possibly try at 1:14 next time.