Come clean about your coffee blunders

I believe itโ€™s cathartic to discuss the silly things youโ€™ve done with your coffee. We all make mistakes! The key is to laugh them off, learn from them, and humbly but fearlessly move on. In that spirit, here are a few of my recent blunders.

1. When making a Clever brew, itโ€™s key to not put the Clever dripper onto your mug until youโ€™re ready for the plunge. Sounds obvious, right? If youโ€™re sleep-deprived enough, not necessarily.

2. On the contrary, when brewing coffee using any single-serve machine, Iโ€™ve found itโ€™s crucial to put your mug where it belongs right from the start. Thankfully, some of these things (my Grindmaster OPOD in particular) come with high-capacity drip trays.

3. Itโ€™s also been brought to my attention that you should try to avoid spilling your coffee all over the floor (see here). Although clean-up afterward is much easier if you spill prior to grinding. Oh, and if youโ€™ve recently swept and mopped.

4. Speaking of grinding, I highly recommend choosing your desired setting before you add your carefully pre-measured quantity of beans to the hopper when single-dosing.

5. Iโ€™m confident the Aeropress fans among us would agree that a paper filter is necessary (as opposed to optional), no? Without one, the โ€œsedimentโ€ you get at the bottom of your Aeropress cup bears a striking resemblance to gravel.

6. Finally, if youโ€™re planning on calculating the weight of your water on the fly in grams when brewing pourover-style using, say, a Beehouse dripper, make sure youโ€™re good at math. For 15 g. of ground coffee, youโ€™ll want to add something like 240 g. of water, give or take a few (depending on taste). Multiplying the weight of the ground coffee by 30 instead of the desired volume of water (8 oz. in my case; 1 oz. of water = roughly 30 g.) will lead to serious overflowโ€”that is, unless you drink from a beer stein.*

Feel like confessing your coffee screw-ups? Give that comment section a workout.

* As you might have guessed re: (6), I sometimes do my โ€œon the flyโ€ math in the following roundabout way: start with X g. of ground coffee, divide X in half and round up to get the desired water volume in oz., then multiply that figure by 30 to convert the target to gram weight. Example: 15 g. ground coffee / 2 = 7.5 oz., rounded up = 8 oz. X 30 = 240 g. water. A much easier, less error-prone method would be to just assume a 1:16 coffee-to-water ratio (in grams); example: 15 g. ground coffee X 16 = 240 g. water. But I enjoy a challenge, and I find multiplying by 30 (i.e. by 3, then adding a zero) is easier to do in my head than multiplying by 16.



Leave a comment

Please note, comments must be approved before they are published

This site is protected by hCaptcha and the hCaptcha Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.