I have a confession to make: I’m a coffee lover. The whole process of coffee-making is just fascinating and the result out-of-this-world. From roasting, to grinding and pressing the beans—its pure art. I’m always on the lookout for interesting new ways and techniques for brewing the perfect cup of coffee.
Over the years of excessive coffee consumption, I believe I have finally found the way to create the perfect cup of coffee using a hand pressed coffee maker.
Coffee as a morning routine
As many other people I like to start my day with a wonderful cup of coffee. It’s my morning routine. It brings me a sense of joy, satisfaction and helps me to awaken my sleepy senses.
Depending on the place I’m at, I’d drink different types coffee, prepared in different ways. Personally, I enjoy hand-made coffee the most, but more to that later. At work we have a fully automatic coffee maker, which produces acceptable coffee, although far from perfect. At home I create my own special blends of coffee using only hand ground beans and hand pressed coffee makers.
On weekends, I get up early—although admittedly, more often than not forcefully, by the children’s ravenous early morning appetite—and after preparing the breakfast for the kids, I grind some fresh beans, slow and steady. I bring some cold water to the boil, fill up the portafilter of the coffee maker and finally press out the magic bean juice. I don’t eat anything for breakfast, a cup of coffee is all I need. In fact, as of wiring this story, it is morning and I am drinking a cup of coffee right now.
Coffee making as a passion
At home I own four different types of coffee makers. You might think that as a minimalist one coffee maker should be plenty, and that’s probably right for most people. But to me, enjoying coffee is not only about drinking it, it’s a lot about the act of preparing it.
Each coffee maker has a different purpose and produces unique coffee. However, all of them have one thing in common: they work entirely without any electricity; all of them are hand-operated. This might be a little nostalgic, but to me it is the best way to experience coffee-making on a basic level, and it allows for the greatest amount of control and influence in the coffee-making process.
My coffee makers
- ROK espresso maker — a traditional portafilter system which creates beautiful espresso and ristretto coffe. This is my favourite and most used coffee maker.
- Bialetti Moka Express—another traditional Italian coffee maker that can brew three strong cups of coffee at once using steam pressure. This one is great when guests are visiting.
- AeroPress—uses a unique brewing approach that combines pressure and steeping. I use this one mostly for camping as it is extremely lightweight and portable.
- Arctic Cold Brew Coffee System—creates decent cold brew in the fridge; perfect for the hot summer days.
Additional equipment
- ROK coffee grinder—a manfully operated grinder, which creates very consistent coffee grounds with infinite settings of coarseness. The advantage of a manual grinder is first of all the noise, and secondly the speed. Electric grinders are very noisy and aggressive, and can actually heat the beans while grinding, this is undesirable. Manual grinders on the other hand are slow and gentle, perfect for the mornings.
- An additional portafilter for busy visiting days and as a replacement if the primary one breaks.
- A coffee ground tamper for even and consistent pressure while pressing the grounds into the portafilter.
The perfect cup of coffee
There are eight key factors that heavily influence the outcome of the coffee-making, which you are in control of and the greatly influence the perfect cup of coffee:
- The type of beans
- The degree of roasting
- The roast date of the beans
- The coarseness of the ground beans
- The time when the beans were ground
- The temperature of the water
- The hardness of the water
- The amount of pressure inflicted when pressing
Step-by-step guide
Below is my personal favourite way to create the perfect cup of coffee, step by step. I use the hand-pressed espresso maker with a portafilter.
- I use beans with an espresso roast, the color is relatively dark and distinctive.
- I prefer coffee beans from South America.
- The fresher the roast, the better; ideally the beans should be consumed four days after the roasting date.
- A portafilter system relies on pressure and therefore requires relatively fine and consistent coffee grounds—I use coarseness setting number 3 of 12 on my grinder, but this varies from device to device.
- I hand-grind my coffee beans immediately before consumption—once the beans are ground, they release their aromatic flavour and that slowly fades, therefore it is best to grind them just before preparation.
- I put a kettle of water to the boil, the water should be as hot as possible for the pressing—once the water is boiling, I pour some water into the coffee cup to heat it up, then I pour about 1dl of hot water into the coffee maker.
- The water at our home is relatively hard (approx. 26°fH), therefore I add a tip of a knife of natron to the water inside of the coffee maker. Salt naturally binds the calcium in the water, natron being ideal due to its low salinity. You could also use distilled water instead. The limescale within the water will otherwise prevent the distinctive coffee foam from unfolding.
- Finally I add the freshly ground coffee into the portafilter and tamper it with about 15g of pressure, I press the hot water through the filter with a steady slow movement. The coffee pours out from the filter creamy and creates a beautiful foam. The amount of water is more than an espresso cup, you could stop once the cup is full up. Personally, I prefer to press all the water through the filter which fills a regular cup about half, this then becomes a lungo coffee (a long espresso).
This is my personal perfect cup of coffee.
Experiences with coffee roasting
Of course I could not resist but to try to roast my own coffee beans. The short conclusion is that the beans from the local roasters facility taste better, nonetheless was it a valuable experience that I’d like to share with you.
There’s many different roasting methods, big roasting facilities have big oven-like machines with turning drums that create near-perfect roasts with predictable outcome. At home you could roast the beans over open fire in a small rotating container, in a popcorn machine, or simply in the oven. The most important aspect is that beans are roasted evenly, at very specific temperatures and to a particular roasting degree.
I chose the oven roasting technique, as I didn’t posses a burner or appropriate container for open fire roasting. In the oven, controlling the temperature is easy, but depending on your oven, it might be difficult to achieve the required high temperature of +270°C. The way I did it was to put one layer of raw beans evenly on a tray with holes, which I then put into the preheated oven at 275°C. I let them roast until I hear the first crack (quiet), I take them out quickly and shake them up a little to turn them around. Soon after the second crack (loud), I take them out. All-in-all about 17-19 minutes in the oven. It all depends on the beans and your desired roasting degree. I was aiming for espresso road as mentioned earlier. After roasting I let the beans cool down a little and shake them up and blow all the skins, also know as chaff, off.
Just a little warning: the whole process creates quite a mess and leaves the room in an unexpected grassy smoke that is quite persistent to get rid of. I bought two kilograms of raw beans that I roasted in about 15 batches, then I stopped. I decided that I’d better leave the roasting the roastery and focus on coffee-making instead.