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When we go out to a café, we receive the highest quality coffee from professionals who have the latest equipment. At home, sadly we are often limited by our equipment and our own amateur barista status. At Wilfa we are determined to change that! Now you have access to professional-quality equipment for your home, and by reading this article you’ll be able to expertly recreate your favourite café brew at home. It does not take much to turn a completely mediocre brewed coffee into a coffee of the highest class. Here are seven tips to help you along the way!
The first thing you should do to ensure the best possible taste of the coffee is to clean all the equipment that comes into contact with the coffee before, during and after the actual brewing. Coffee leftovers from the past will add an unpleasant flavour to the freshly brewed coffee. It doesn’t take long before any coffee drinker notices this impact on their brew. Coffee that is tainted by a lack of cleaning often tastes ashy, bitter or metallic – not what you want at all! Use a coffee cleaner such as Clean Drop or a de-tannin cleaner dissolved in water to clean the inside of the funnel once in a while. Wash the jug and filter holder with soapy water and rinse thoroughly.
It’s important not only to use fresh coffee, but also to grind the beans yourself. Both of these actions will have an enormous impact on the flavours you experience in the cup. Look for coffee from roasters that put the ‘roasted on’ date on the bag & try to use them within a few weeks of this date.
Store your coffee beans in an airtight container, protected from sunlight, heat and moisture. If the beans start to get old and dry, they will have lost a lot of flavour, and you have a bad starting point for brewing.
Always grind your beans fresh for each brew and never buy pre-ground coffee if you can help it. Grinding coffee increases the surface area that air has access to and goes stale alarmingly quickly. Grind your coffee immediately before brewing to retain as many delicious aromas and flavours as possible.
As is well known, coffee filters are made of paper, and when the coffee is drawn through the filter, the filter itself will give off an unfavourable paper taste which ends up in the flask. By rinsing the filter before use, you will prevent an unwanted taste in the coffee, while avoiding lint and other things that naturally come with the filter. We also advise using white filters instead of brown ones, as these give off less taste.
A coffee cup mainly consists of two ingredients: 98.5% water and the rest coffee. Therefore it goes without saying that the water used will have a great impact on the end result. Depending on where you live, your water is probably not great for brewing coffee. To counteract this, we always recommend using filtered water for brewing coffee. Alternatives like the Peak Water Jug are specifically designed for brewing water for coffee brewing.
Cold water is recommended, as it often contains more oxygen and thus helps to extract the flavours in a better way.
When filling your brewer with water and coffee (in the funnel), it is important to have a plan for how much coffee you actually want to brew, and then the weight of coffee beans this amount requires. Generally, you should count 60 grams of coffee beans for 1 litre of coffee, but you can find lots of filter coffee instructions and recipes online if you want to experiment.
Some coffee makers, such as the test winner Svart Precision , have a water container with a decilitre measure that also shows how many grams of coffee you need for the different amounts of water. This makes it very easy to ensure the right mixing ratio whether you are brewing one cup or one litre of coffee.
With the right ratios in place, it is important to shake the filter holder slightly to ensure a "flat coffee bed". In this way, you ensure that all the coffee comes into contact with the water, and that no part of the coffee is wasted.
Tip: When buying the coffee grinder Svart uniform, you also get the coffee scale Svart Uni , which has an included app that shows the right amount of coffee in relation to water.
A perfectly brewed coffee depends on having the right water temperature and contact time between water and coffee. Optimally, the water should be 92-96 degrees already from the first drop and throughout the funnel process. At the same time, the water should be in contact with the ground coffee for 4-6 minutes before it drips into the flask, depending on the type of coffee in question.
These are requirements that the European Coffee Brewing Center (ECBC) also sets when they have to approve a coffee maker. Unfortunately, it is far from all coffee makers sold today that have this approval, but the Wilfa test winner Precision brewer is among the approved funnels.
To ensure the correct contact time, regardless of the amount of coffee you want to brew, use the funnel's adjustable drip stop. With the right adjustment, you can ensure the same contact time when brewing one cup as when brewing an entire jug. Alternatively, you can also adjust the degree of grinding to adjust the required contact time. Finer grinding requires less contact time to extract the flavours and is well suited to brewing small amounts of coffee.
After brewing, pour the coffee into a pre-heated thermos if you’re not going to drink it straight away. Ideally your coffee should not be left in the server for more than half an hour, as it quickly loses its taste and freshness as it cools.
If you want to have coffee throughout the day, we recommend that you brew a little at a time several times during the day for ultimate freshness and flavour.
