Coffee Information

I write too much about how to make great coffee. I don’t spend nearly enough time talking about how to make bad coffee, so here’s a list of quick and easy ways to ruin your coffee.

1. Don’t clean your coffeemaker regularly. Minerals from your water and oils from old batches of coffee can negatively affect the taste of your coffee.
2. Use non-filtered water. Many sources of water come with minerals and other particles that can change the way your coffee tastes for the worse.
3. Use ground coffee. Ground coffee starts to go stale and lose it’s flavor within fifteen minutes. Do you want to guess how long it was sitting on the shelf before you took it home.
4. Use the wrong grind. The beans have to be ground to the correct size to get the best taste out of them, depending on your method of brewing. Use medium grind for a drip brewer. Coarse grind for a french press. Fine grind for an espresso maker.
5. Use stale coffee. Even whole bean coffee has a limited shelf life. Depending on who you ask, whole bean coffee lasts one to three weeks, depending on how you store it. Think of it as a vegetable or a fruit, it can’t sit around on your counter for months without losing flavor.
6. Store your coffee in the fridge or freezer. Both are good ways to make your coffee damp and coffee doesn’t do well in damp conditions. Plus, coffee absorbs the flavors and aromas of the other items in the freezer and refrigerator.
7. Use too little or too much coffee. The target is two tablespoons of coffee grounds per cup of water. That might be too strong for some people, but start out there and work your way down to find a taste that you like.
8. Reuse your coffee grounds. What’s left after you brew your coffee is nothing but bitter and disgusting tasting. Don’t even think about it.
9. Let your coffee sit around all day. Extra points if you leave it in the carafe on top of a hot plate. Either way, your coffee isn’t going to taste fresh after an hour (15 minutes if you’re leaving it on your coffeemaker’s hot plate).
10. Reheat your coffee in a microwave. Nothing kills the flavor of a cup of coffee more than a microwave.

Do you know any other good ways to ruin coffee?

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Photo by Fricke_K.

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