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Brew Better Coffee - The Big Two
Here's where you start. Without the Big Two, you're lost. There's no hope for good coffee.
1 - Fresh Coffee
Let's start with what's acceptable to consider coffee "fresh."
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If the bean is green, that is not roasted, it'll stay fresh for a year, maybe more. This is how roasters buy their coffee and good roasters only roast what they plan to use or sell in the very near future.
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Once the bean has been roasted and it's in your greedy little coffee-loving hands, it'll stay fresh for weeks. If you're making espresso, expect about 2 weeks. For drip or pour over coffee, it may be good for up to 4 weeks. It depends on the coffee.
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Once the coffee has been ground (now pay attention, this is IMPORTANT) the coffee will stay fresh for about one minute. That's right, a mere 60 seconds.
What does all of this mean to you? You need to have a good way to determine the age of your roasted coffee. When was it roasted? There are a couple of ways to tell and none of them involve reading the "best before date" on the side of the coffee bag you were considering purchasing from the local grocery.
If you have a good, local roaster in your area, go there. They'll sell you coffee that was roasted that very day if you like and the oldest coffee you're likely to find just sitting around will probably be less than a week post-roast.
If you don't have a local roaster, there are plenty of great places to purchase coffee on the internet. The good ones roast the coffee to your order and the cost with shipping to your door ends up being almost the same as if you were to go to a store and get some crappy, stale coffee. Try to find a good roaster near home (either in person or on the internet) to minimize transit time.
The rules of staleness above also mean that you need to have a grinder and use it JUST BEFORE you begin to brew your coffee. If you want it to taste its best, brew within 60 seconds of grinding. More on grinders just below.
Storing Your Coffee
Most good coffee comes in plastic bags with a little one-way valve. That valve is there to allow the coffee to de-gas after it's been roasted. Coffee releases CO2 for the first two to four days after roast. That's why you'll often find freshly roasted coffee in a bag that's "puffed up". This inflation of the bag is a good thing, as it indicates that your coffee is indeed as fresh as you expect it to be and the CO2 in the bag displaces any oxygen that may try to get in there and make your coffee start to go stale.
To store your coffee, simply keep it in the bag and keep it in a pantry or somewhere away from direct sunlight and excessive heat. Don't put your freshly roasted coffee in the refrigerator or the freezer if you plan to use it anytime soon. The process of cooling down the beans does not hurt them, but when you remove the beans from the fridge or freezer to make coffee, you will get condensation on the beans which will alter the taste (for the worse).
There are a lot of opinions about what freezing does to preserve the freshness of coffee. I've done this a couple of times and I think the results were pretty interesting. I was in Seattle and stopped by Cafe Vivace where I purchased several pounds of coffee to bring home to Texas. I knew I had purchased more coffee than I could drink in two weeks, so I held out a pound and a half (to get down to business with espresso making) and put the other pound and a half in the freezer. This coffee was two days post roast. Well, about a week and a half later, I took the first bag of coffee out of the freezer (half pound bags) and let it thaw out for a full day. Low and behold, this nearly-two-week-old coffee tasted fresh and delicious. I repeated the same with the other two bags over the course of about another week and the coffee held up pretty well.
So, the moral of the story with regards to freezing your coffee is this: 1) Freezing your coffee will not preserve it indefinitely -- it will merely slow the staling process and maybe buy you another week or two before the coffee goes stale. b) When you take the coffee out of the freezer, let it sit and come down to room temperature for about a day. You don't want to put frozen coffee in your grinder and you want the temperature in the bag to equalize so that there's no condensation left in the bag before you begin to brew.
2 - The Coffee Grinder
Make no mistake, this is where the brewed coffee starts. You need a grinder to enjoy great coffee at home. It's often said that a skilled barista (coffee maker person) can make better espresso with a $500 grinder and a $200 espresso machine than with a $200 grinder and a $2,000 espresso machine. This is how important a good grinder is to making quality coffee.
The type and style of grinder you use depends on the brewing method you plan on using and, of course, your budget. There are two categories that coffee grinders fall into: blade grinders and burr grinders.
Blade Grinders
If you already have a coffee grinder and it cost in the neighborhood of $20, you can bet it's a blade grinder. You can tell it's a blade grinder because it looks like a small food processor with high speed blades that spin around when you press down on a button. If you're planning on using a drip coffee maker, you can probably get by with this type of grinder.
The best thing about blade grinders is their cost. You can pick one up on sale for about $10 or maybe pay up to $30 for one. If you see two blade grinders side by side and the price is not the same, get the cheaper one. They're mostly all created equal.
The worst thing about blade grinders is the complete lack of any means to determine or control the size or consistency of the ground coffee. If you're making espresso, you want finer particles than if you're making press pot coffee. With a blade grinder, you're pretty much just guessing at the particle size. Beyond that, if you were to guess correctly about the average size of the coffee grounds, a blade grinder still produces extremely inconsistent particle sizes. Your ground coffee will consist of relative boulders and powder. This is not a good thing when the consistency of particle size is important.
Again, for many drip coffee applications or when a paper or polyester filter is to be used, you may be able to get by with a blade grinder.
Burr Grinders
As the name implies, a burr grinder does not use blades, but uses burrs to crush the coffee into the desired particle size. A coffee grinder's burrs are usually shaped like doughnuts with sharp teeth cut into them. Burrs come in sets of two, one stationary burr (usually the top burr) which can be moved toward and away from the rotating burr (usually the bottom burr). The ability to move the burrs closer together or farther away from each other makes the grind consistency much greater with a burr grinder.
You might expect that burr grinders come in a variety of shapes and sizes and they do. They also come in very different levels of quality and adjustability. The two main categories of burr grinders are "stepped" grinders and "non-stepped" grinders. A stepped grinder allows you to change the grind setting only to a finite amount of different levels. It has notches to change the fineness of the coffee and you cannot adjust between two notches. With a non-stepped grinder, you can set the grind level wherever you please (no notches).
Oh, by the way, you can also get a burr grinder that's powered by you. Remember those old manual grinders like your parents probably used to have? Well, those can be pretty good too, but they take a lot more time and effort to make your morning cup (better living through technology, right). A pretty good manual grinder will set you back about $60-$80. One of the best brands around is Zassenhaus from Germany (you can buy them at Sweet Maria's). Check these out if you're interested in good, cheap coffee and don't mind a little extra work. These are almost all stepped grinders.
You may be asking yourself now whether you need a stepped or non-stepped burr grinder. If you're going to be making espresso, you should be thinking non-stepped. They cost more, but the ability to change the ground particle size infinitely can be invaluable in espresso making. Good quality non-stepped espresso grinders start around $300 and can cost $700 or more (that's for a pro-sumer model, not a straight-up commercial grinder that may cost $5K).
If you're not planning on making espresso, a stepped grinder may be the best bet. It's good to be able to change the particle size from press pot to drip to Aeropress, but the minute adjustments are not nearly as critical as they are with espresso. A good non-stepped burr grinder could cost as little as $50 or as much as $400.
If you've got cash coming out of your mattress and you are prone to upgrade-itis, get the best non-stepped grinder you can and still sleep at night (because of buyer's remorse, not from too much coffee). It'll come in handy later when you decide you want that $10,000 espresso machine.
How Fine Do I Grind?
I talked about grind adjustability. Why would you want to adjust the grind? Well, let me tell you, it's all about surface area. The finer you grind your coffee, the more surface area the coffee particles have. The more surface area, the faster the coffee extracts from the beans into the hot water. The coarser you grind, the more slowly the coffee extracts.
To take this relationship a step further, the longer you extract coffee, the more bitter it will be. That's why many people strive to extract their coffee in the least amount of time possible. Say...25 to 30 seconds. Sound like espresso? Well it is; and that's why you grind so fine for espresso and that's why you need so much water pressure to make espresso. Espresso uses an extremely fine grind, so the coffee extracts very quickly. In order to get the water in and out of the ground coffee you need a lot of pressure.
These relationships between grind size, extraction time, and taste are very important when you're trying to make your coffee the absolute best it can be.
Here's where the brew methods I'll describe stack up from coarsest to finest:
Coarse
Press Pot
Manual Pour-Over / Automatic Drip
Aeropress
Espresso
Fine
It takes some time messing with your grinder and brew equipment to figure out exactly how fine or coarse you need to grind in each coffee situation. It's all part of the fun!