From a bean to a cup of coffee, all the coffee knowledge you need is here

I don't know when coffee has become a necessity in many people's lives, used to refresh the mind in the morning, used to entertain in the afternoon, and used to stay up all night at night......

 

Although I often drink coffee, many people still have trouble getting to the café. Whether you drink coffee or buy coffee beans, you don't know where to start with all kinds of information and brewing methods. The origin, production process, and brewing method of these dazzling varieties are naturally closely related to the flavor of coffee.

Okay, so let's talk about how a bean becomes a cup of coffee.

 

directory
01 | How coffee beans are processed

Green bean processing, coffee roasting, coffee grinding

02 | Common coffee brewing methods

Pressure, hand punch, siphon, mocha,

Espresso, which is your favorite?

03 | What makes a good cup of coffee

01 | How coffee beans are processed
When choosing coffee beans, you can often see all kinds of information on the label of coffee beans, such as sun drying, washing, dark roasting, pre-roasting, medium grinding, very fine grinding, and so on. While the process can be roughly understood literally, each treatment brings an unexpected flavor to the coffee.

 

Handling of green beans
You can't be more familiar with the dark brown whole coffee beans, but the fruit of coffee is rarely known. The bright red color is the mark of ripe coffee cherries. Therefore, when hand-picked, one can easily tell the ripeness of the coffee.

 

After picking, the fruit of the coffee undergoes a series of processes such as refining the green beans, wrapping and removing the pulp, and drying the green beans. It's only the most rudimentary processing on the farm, but knowing this can help you choose the right coffee for your taste.

The red coffee pulp is actually edible, and even has a melon-like flavor, which is very sweet
Common green bean treatment methods include sun treatment, washing treatment and mixed treatment.

Sun-drying method: The oldest method of processing green coffee beans is actually to remove the peel after the ripe coffee cherries are dried in the sun. Sun-dried green beans often add some new flavors, such as the berry flavor common to sun-dried beans, but many times, sun-dried beans are accompanied by some unpleasant miscellaneous flavors, such as earthy, over-fermented, and slightly more wild flavors.

 

Water washing method: The fresh coffee cherries need to be removed from the pulp, soaked and fermented in clean water, and then rinsed with plenty of water to remove impurities on the surface of the green beans. As a result, washed green beans have a more "clean" quality. At the same time, washed beans tend to be more acidic and slightly more complex.

 

Mixed treatment: In addition to the common sun drying and washing, green coffee beans are also treated with peel sun drying method, honey treatment method, and semi-washing treatment method, which will improve the sweetness, sourness and richness of coffee to varying degrees.

 

Roasting of coffee
Coffee roasting should be the most delicate part of coffee making, and even the time and temperature of any production process can be measured in seconds. Roasters have to get it right in order to achieve the perfect balance of sourness, sweetness and bitterness in the beans.

 

Generally speaking, the deeper and longer the roast, the lower the acidity and the higher the bitterness of the beans, while the sweetness rises first and then decreases, reaching its best in medium roasting. Therefore, how to control the roast degree of coffee has a great impact on the final flavor of the coffee.

Light roast: Light roasted coffee beans are dominated by acidity, which can bring out the flavor of the coffee itself.

Medium Roast: The acidity of the beans decreases, the sweetness increases, and some desirable roast flavors begin to emerge.

Dark roast: The acidity and sweetness fade away, and the beans begin to caramelize and carbonize, resulting in the typical high concentration and bitterness.

Most common espresso beans are dark roasted, but if you want to appreciate the personality and flavor of the coffee itself, light roast and medium roast beans are the right choice.

 

In fact, it is not enough to simply summarize the roasting of coffee with shallow, medium and dark, the length of time and the strength of the fire are all crucial elements. The sugars and acids in coffee produce a series of chemical reactions during the roasting process, producing a variety of new aromatic compounds, which are the source of coffee's rich taste.

Grinding of coffee
There are many factors that affect the grind of coffee, such as the depth of roasting, the altitude of the place of origin, and the brewing method. Among them, the depth of roasting affects the hardness of the coffee beans, and the altitude of the origin affects the density of the coffee beans. However, different coffee brewing methods have their own grind that works best for you.

 

In general, the degree of grind required for different brewing methods is as follows:

French Press: Medium grind

Pour-over coffee: Medium grind

Moka pot: Finely grinded

Siphon coffee pot: Medium grind

Espresso: Extremely fine grinding

Of course, freshly ground coffee is the best. But if you think it's too much trouble to grind the coffee yourself, you can also ask the store to help you grind the coffee beans when you buy them. However, ground coffee should be drunk as soon as possible, and the taste period of ground coffee is much shorter than that of whole beans.

 

Of course, brewing skills and personal taste preferences are closely related to the grinding of coffee, and it often takes a long time to find the perfect grind for you.

02 | A common way of brewing coffee
After primary processing, careful roasting and precise grinding, the final key step from bean to coffee is brewing.

 

However, brewing coffee is definitely a technical job. If the extraction is under-extracted, the coffee will not only taste bland, but will often be spicy and jerky, and if it is over-extracted, the burnt bitterness of the coffee will overshadow everything. If you want to get a good cup of coffee, you must control all the details of coffee brewing, such as the grinding thickness, the ratio of powder to water, the temperature and time of brewing, and so on. Baristas need to learn and accumulate experience over a long period of time to control the degree of caffeine – rich in taste, outstanding in flavor, and stop before bitterness and miscellaneous flavors precipitate.

There are many common ways to brew coffee:

French press
The French press is probably the easiest way to brew coffee. With a simple steeping and straining, you can get a good cup of coffee. When the coffee made with the press is almost finished, a little fine residue will be brought out, so you don't have to finish the coffee and just leave a mouthful in the pot.

 

Pour-over coffee
The so-called hand pouring is actually pouring coffee powder with hot water to slowly extract the coffee. Pour-over coffee is probably the most aggressive brew in a café, but it's not easy to make sure that the flavor of the coffee is perfect every time.

 

For the same coffee, the amount of coffee powder, grind thickness, brewing time, and brewing temperature must be fixed as much as possible each time, and if different varieties and origins are brewed, these parameters must all be readjusted. Therefore, it takes constant practice and experimentation to brew a consistently good cup of coffee.

When pouring coffee by hand, the coffee powder releases carbon dioxide when exposed to hot water, causing the powder layer to swell, so the flavor substances are more likely to precipitate
Siphon pot
The wonderful brewing style of the alchemist style has made siphon coffee more and more popular. The siphon pot is divided into two parts, the lower pot is filled with water and the upper pot is filled with powder. After the water in the lower pot is heated, it will be pushed by the steam down the glass tube to the upper pot, and when the lower pot cools, the coffee brewed in the upper pot will be sucked back into the lower pot. The whole brewing process is like a wonderful chemistry show. However, the difficulty of brewing coffee in a siphon pot is very high, and it is better to avoid it carefully.

 

Moka pot
In many Western countries, almost every household uses a Moka pot to brew coffee. The use of Moka pots is more complicated because of the high brewing temperature and the high ratio of powder to water, and the coffee is usually very strong and very bitter, but that's exactly why people love it.

 

Espresso
As the most popular coffee drink today, it can almost be said that espresso has driven the rapid popularity of coffee culture. Making espresso requires a coffee machine, a grinder, and brewing techniques.

 

A good Espresso has a thick layer of grease (Crema) on the surface, which can often be used as one of the indicators of coffee: the more grease, the fresher the beans, and the darker the oil, the darker the roast.

Although the grease on the surface of coffee is also pronounced "Crema" in Italy, these are actually delicate foams produced by the carbon dioxide dissolved by the coffee ground under high pressure
Although espresso is good, it is people's favorite to add milk, milk foam, and even water to make various fancy coffee drinks.

 

Espresso with milk can isolate the bitter taste, and adding sugar can make the coffee more palatable, and fancy coffee will taste good as it should. However, good coffee has its own terroir personality that is worth savoring, and sometimes, try a lot of different varieties of single-origin coffee, and you may find a real preference for coffee.

 

In addition to these common ways of brewing coffee, the new coffee artifact Aeropress and capsule coffee machines are all convenient and easy to use. Of course, although there are difficulties and easy ways to brew, there are still opinions on style and taste, and what you choose in the end depends on personal preference~

03 | What makes a good cup of coffee
Although different coffees will vary in terms of green processing and roasting, coffee experts, like wine, have their own criteria for judging coffee.