The Coffee Basics

If you want to skip the reading, watch above!

There are some simple basics to coffee that many people don’t know. Today we will be talking a bit about three basics for those who have a regular coffee maker or are even dipping their toes into some other brew methods.

We are going to be looking at roasts, water, and ratios. It isn’t some flashy post, but a necessary one.

Coffee Roasts

There are different types of roasts that make of the flavors of coffee. Unless they are artificially flavored, but that is a different story.

You have your light roasts, medium roasts, and dark roasts. A quick thing to note is their lightness to darkness comes from the temperature in the roasting process as well as some other factors.

Light Roast Coffee

Light roasts are brighter in flavor and are usually more floral. You’ll get a more complex flavor with fruitiness and tanginess as well. It is important to know that the cup will be lighter as well. It wont feel as heavy. Usually the lighter roasts will have a bit more caffeine.

Medium Roast Coffee

Medium tends to be my favorite. It is a richer flavor with some of those deeper sweets like berries, richer chocolate flavors, and honey. The texture is sort of in the middle. The cup is starting to get a bit more full. I just tend to think it is a nice balance.

Our Starter fluid is a medium roast, which you can check out here.

Dark Roast Coffee

Here, the flavor starts to change a lot. A lot of times if it is a really dark roast, it will be more Smokey and earthy in flavor. Think toasty. The texture is a lot more full as well. If you like your coffee bold, start here. I have had some really good dark roasts before! Don’t be afraid to try them all.

Water

Next, we will go over water. I’ll start here: don’t use tap water! Most of the time, tap water has way too many minerals and chemicals to purify it to make it good for coffee. Here in Coprus Christi, our water is super hard. It produces tons of buildup on applicens and showers. You can smell the chlorine from the sink. This will make your coffee sludgy and gross. Coffee is made of 95% water!

To make it easy, I prefer spring water. It is purified and has a nice amount of natural minerals. You can also try distilled, but I feel the lack of minerals in distilled takes away some of the character of your coffee. Regular purified drinking water can have some of the same Issues as tap water, so I would shy away from it as well.

Now you can get super technical with your water, but this isn’t the time to get into all that.

Ratios for Coffee

Now ratios. We have talked about what type of coffee you might like and what water to use. You can still have bad tasting coffee without getting your ratios right. You’ll need a scale for this part.

It is a bit of upfront work, but once you get it right, you can set it and forget it.

Alright so why is this important? Great question. Too much water and not enough coffee yields a really watered down coffee. If that is your thing, well cool. Too much coffee and not enough water makes it really strong. Not the good kind of strong!

A good place to stay is a 1:15 or 1:17 ratio. This means for every one gram of coffee, use 17 grams of water. A cup of coffee usually calls for around 15-17 grams of coffee. You’ll use about 250 grams of coffee. Pro tip, for water, ml and grams are about the same.

If you use a regular coffee makes, you’re probably making at least 4 cups of coffee. So 60 grams of coffee would be be about a liter of water. Experiment and find what you like! That is what makes it fun!