My sister was visiting and I made a pot of coffee. My sister had a cup and said “That’s really good coffee. How did you make it?”
I’ve gotten that same response from many, many people who drink my coffee and I finally realized that there’s a lot of people who just don’t know how to make a pot of coffee. There’s no magic to it: start with good coffee and measure what you put in the coffee pot.
Pretentious coffee snobs are annoying. No one cares about your perfect cup of espresso. If you’re one of those people just go away and die somewhere. Really.
When I bought my first drip coffee maker years ago — a Cuisinart 12-Cup Brew Central Programmable Coffee Maker that’s still being manufactured and sold today — I wanted to make coffee like Starbucks, so I went to the Starbucks web site and read their instructions.
Step Zero – Buy good coffee. They don’t actually say that on the Starbucks site, but they’re assuming you’re buying Starbucks ground coffee. You can’t make good food from bad ingredients, and you can’t make good coffee from inferior beans.
Buy some good quality coffee. It doesn’t have to be from Starbucks, but it can’t be dry brown dust with bits of bean husk in it. The grounds should smell like the best cup of coffee you ever had and look like rich black loam. If you’re looking for suggestions try Starbucks Casi Cielo or Peet’s Sulawesi Kalosi.
Step One – Choose the right grind
— Starbucks – How to brew coffee at home
For a flat bottom filter, use a medium grind that resembles sea salt. Cone filters use a finer grind that resembles granulated sugar.
That seems clear enough. My Cuisinart has a cone filter, so get ground coffee that looks like granulated sugar. Easy. Done.
Trigger alert for pretentious coffee snobs: I tend to buy Peet’s coffee and grind the whole pound at once. A pound lasts about a week at my house, so it’s not going to lose any of its vital essence. Get over yourself.
Step Two – Measure
— Starbucks – How to brew coffee at home
Use 2 tablespoons of freshly ground coffee for every 6 ounces of water.
I think that this is where they lose people. 6 ounces of water? My coffee pot says it makes 12 cups. How many tablespoons for a pot of coffee? What if I want to make a half a pot? Or 4 cups?
First off, if you try to make a pot of coffee and you’re measuring grounds by the tablespoon your measurements will be off every time. You will add too much coffee or not enough. Don’t use a tablespoon.
Second, the cups on a drip coffee pot are not the same as a 1 cup measure. A one cup measure is 8 fluid ounces. My “12 cup” Cuisinart pot holds 64 fluid ounces of coffee, so “1 Cuisinart cup” = 5-1/3 fluid ounces. WTF?
Using the Starbucks measuring method I’d need 10-2/3 tablespoons per pot. Try it and you’ll get weak, underwhelming coffee. That’s not how they make coffee at Starbucks.
Make a perfect pot of coffee
My method is simple: Use the lines on the pot to measure water, use measuring cups to measure coffee grounds.
Full pot of coffee – fill the pot to 12 “cups” of water, use 1 cup of ground coffee.
Half pot – 6 “cups” water, 1/2 cup ground coffee.
Third pot – 4 “cups” water, 1/3 cup ground coffee.
Quarter pot – 3 “cups” water, 1/4 cup ground coffee.
Easy, right? Full pot, one cup of ground coffee. Half pot, 1/2 cup of ground coffee. Quarter pot, 1/4 cup of ground coffee.
For advanced coffee preparers:
Two-thirds of a pot – 8 cups of water, add 1/3 cup of ground coffee TWICE!
10 cups of coffee – 10 cups of water, 1/2 and 1/3 cups of ground coffee.
Try this method and and I GUARANTEE you’ll never go back to whatever you were doing to make coffee before or NO MONEY BACK. You too will hear the words “That’s really good coffee. How did you make it?”
Hope you find this useful.