Submitted by Admin
Don’t be fooled by all the expensive-looking bells and whistles you see at your local coffee shop. You can put together a delicious cup of coffee using only the tools available in the average kitchen. Here’s how you can take your home-brew coffee to the next level.
1 – Choose the right beans
Have you heard of coffee cupping? If you start looking into specialty coffee beans, you’ll see the SCAA cupping protocol mentioned all the time. It refers to a method used by professional coffee tasters to give coffee beans an objective score based on different attributes.
Trying to dissect the ins and outs of the coffee cupping procedure can get complicated fast. But all you need to know as a consumer is that the higher the cup score of a coffee bean, the more delicious they are. On top of that, the cupping scale is logarithmic. This means the gap between 90 and 95 is many times bigger than the gap between 80 and 90 on the scale.
All of this means that if you are used to just getting cheap ground coffee from your local market, you can immediately make your coffee many times better by buying ground coffee with a cup score of 80 or above from a specialty shop.
2 – Grind your own beans
Coffee tastes better when it’s freshly ground, and grinding your own beans isn’t difficult. You can do it with a coffee grinder, or in a pinch, you can use a regular blender. Grinding your own coffee also allows you to control how finely ground you want the coffee to be.
The final size of the beans affects how fast water will pass through them, which in turn affects the final taste of the coffee. You can experiment with different grind sizes to figure out the best choice for your brewing method.
3 – Try different additives
The simplest and easiest way to change the flavor of your coffee is to add stuff to it. There is a lot to love about a purist’s coffee, one where not even sugar is added. But if you want to spice things up, you can try adding different types of milk, sweeteners, creamers, and more.
Some people even add a dash of salt to neutralize the bitterness of a strong coffee, and there are even special flavored syrups made specially to match with specific types of coffee and create unique flavors.
4 – Lookup coffee shop recipes
Those fancy tools found at your local coffee shop aren’t there just for show. There are indeed types of coffee that are hard to make without special equipment. But you will be surprised at how many recipes you can get done with just a regular stove and the right ingredients.
Look up DIY recipes for your favorite coffee shop drinks — there’s a good chance you have the ingredients and tools needed to make at least one of them, if not several.