Browsing all posts in Coffee help.

Sweet Maria’s studies steep time & brew strength for cupping

I always say that making good coffee is just chemistry.  If you don’t believe that, check out this video from Sweet Maria’s.  They’re analyzing the brew strength of light roasts versus dark roasts in cupping and determine that they may need to actually grind light roast differently and also possibly adjust the steep time of [...]

Coffee tutorials and taste tests thanks to the St. Petersburg Times

The St. Petersburg Times had a day of coffee features yesterday, and it ended up producing some pretty informational articles.
First was an article about the lingo of coffee tasting. Tasting coffee in a group setting — called cupping — can be somewhat intimidating, but I find that it’s one of my favorite ways to [...]

How to prepare Turkish coffee

Two coffees I have never had and want to try are Cuban coffee and Turkish coffee. Thanks to CoffeeTweet, today I found several videos on YouTube about how to prepare Turkish coffee. The video below, “How To Make The Perfect Cup of Turkish Coffee”, is a nice short and sweet primer on the [...]

Clover intro video on YouTube

I found this introductory video to the Clover coffee machine at The Coffee Ethic’s fancy new website. The video is produced by Wired, and it’s nicely done. It was created back in summer of 2008, so some of the news is slightly outdated, but it still provides a great overview of what sets [...]

Coffee video: Behmor coffee roaster in action

As you may know, I bought a Behmor 1600 around Christmas.  Thereafter, in a deal with my wife, I took a few months to clean out my John Deere room & workshop so I could roast down there, but I agreed to not roast until it was clean.  After it was sufficiently clean, I pulled [...]

Any interest in a 417Coffee meetup?

Recently I have had two different parties here in 417land suggest that I coordinate a meetup of people involved or interested in homeroasting coffee or simply the finer points of roasting and brewing coffee well.  I’ve been noticing more and more conversation going on about coffee in general, and it seems that the specialty coffee [...]

Video intros to cupping coffee

“Cupping” is  a term used to describe the process of sampling a small amount of coffee to get a sense of its aroma and flavor.  Cupping is to coffee as tasting is to wine.
If you dive into the world of specialty coffees, you’ll hear the word “cupping” quite a bit because this is how those [...]

Latte help from champion barista Heather Perry

Champion barista Heather Perry teaches how to make a latte at home, and if you don’t have an espresso machine, she also teaches you how to make a similar coffee drink using a moka pot. Thanks to the people at GotMilk.com and KlatchRoasting.com, as well as the lead to this video from @PTsJeff [...]

Brewing how-to photos for an Aeropress

Around the first of the year, I purchased an Aeropress from SweetMarias.com.  After some trial and error, I ended up brewing some good coffee.  Since then, I’ve tried it on and off — interspersed with brewing an a Chemex 4-cup brewer, a French press, and a Techivorm automatic drip brewer — with some success.  Some [...]

Using coffee as you go green

I personally have a compost pile around the side of my house, and one of the primary nitrogen ingredients (aka green ingredients) I used in my compost pile is coffee grounds.  I use my personal coffee grounds, plus I will occasionally pick up grounds in bulk from Starbucks or The Coffee Ethic to supplement.  Locally, [...]