I’ve been using the coffee maker we bought years ago, almost every week (except on hot days) and it’s always this light brown-ish coffee that it produces and it’s always been like that and I thought it’s just how it is — that it’s not the same expensive machines that Starbucks have in their shops so you can’t really expect much from it, right?
Well, that’s exactly what I’ve always thought — until one day when I watched tons of videos about coffee making process and then it hit me: maybe I’m wrong about it and that there’s actually a way to make better coffee using the ordinary, inexpensive coffee maker 🙂
Based on my understanding of those coffee making videos, I saw a pattern on almost all great coffee drinks — aside from getting the right temperature of the water, the “flow” of said water is also a huge factor in producing a great coffee.
Look, I’m not a barista nor an expert in coffee but I like figuring things out 🙂
How can I replicate some of the things that these coffee experts do with only the things available in our house and improve the quality of coffee produced by the coffee maker?
I singled out the process of slowing down the flow of water through the coffee to get maximum extraction of flavors as I thought that sounded simple enough to implement without the expensive machines they use.
So how do I slow down water flow?
Do I break apart the coffee machine and change it’s mechanism? Well that’s obviously a bad idea since I know nothing about electronics or mechanics and I’d just do more damage than success 🙂
Okay, I said to myself, “the reason they tamper the coffee before pressing was to ‘compress’ the coffee granules, right?” — at least that’s how I understood the process. So, okay, makes sense, a denser coffee grounds would slow down the flow of water since there’s less air or gaps between the granules.
So I put on a food-grade plastic gloves and pressed the coffee grounds inside the coffee maker, without breaking the equipment 🙂
But then the videos also mentioned water channels, which I understood to be caused by water jets, piercing through the coffee grounds, essentially breaking this compressed coffee grounds, making water easily pass through (via these channels).
Lightbulb moment!
I figured, ‘ll use extra coffee filters to act as “shield” from the water jets so the pressure from the hot water is absorbed by the extra coffee filter, thus protecting the compressed coffee ground from getting pierced!
So that’s exactly what I did, I folded a coffee filter and placed it where the water jet would be pouring into, and it actually worked! 🙂
The end result was a darker coffee, with more flavor (thanks to longer extraction) and overall a great experience 🙂
Here’s how I did it, just in case you wanted to try it yourself:
