Your Story: The Perfect Home-Brew.
With years of experience and a passion for brewing the perfect cup of coffee, our Head of Coffee at The Coffee Club, Michaela Gerard, offers her expert tips and techniques for coffee enthusiasts looking to elevate their home brewing game. Her advice covers everything from grinding beans to perfecting extraction times, ensuring that coffee lovers can recreate The Coffee Club experience in their own kitchens.
Michaela Gerard - Head of Coffee.
As someone who makes coffee at home daily (and no, I'm not talking instant), I know the minefield that brewing a good cup of coffee can be. So, I thought I'd offer up some of my best tips for making your favourite Three Stories™ coffee in the comfort of your kitchen.
1. Grind your coffee fresh every time
It's vital to grind your coffee beans fresh each time you make a coffee. Once coffee is ground, oxidation accelerates, resulting in your Three Stories™ coffee losing all its natural sweetness, acidity, and lovely aromas. Instead, it will just taste flat and bitter.
2. Measure, measure, measure!
Depending on what coffee machine you have at home, the amount of coffee required in the basket will vary. The best guide is to follow the recommendations in the manual that comes with your coffee machine, allowing a 1-gram variance either side.
If your coffee machine comes with two baskets, ensure you go with the biggest basket only, to achieve a good strength profile in your cup.
Profile Strength: "How strong the coffee is".
Portafilter/Group Handle: The removable device with a handle that holds the basket.
Basket: The part of the portafilter that holds the coffee grounds.
The Portafilter filling up the basket.
I'm working with a 1:1.6 brew ratio for our Three Stories™ milk coffees, so try these two recipes at home.
This is the best brew ratio for Three Stories™ as it where I found it to be the sweetest and the most balanced taste.
- 18 grams of ground coffee (dose) / 29 grams of wet coffee (yield) / extracted in 25 secs
- 22 grams ground coffee / 36 grams of wet coffee (yield) / extracted in 27 secs
These recipes should result in a rich, sweet, and creamy espresso with notes of toffee, hazelnuts, and dark chocolate.
3. Weigh your coffee grounds
Once you've ascertained the weight of coffee needed, you should use a set of digital scales to weigh this amount into your basket, allowing only a 0.2-gram variance.
By weighing, you'll ensure a consistent strength, concentration, and flavour profile in your cup every time you brew Three Stories™.
4. Prep the coffee bed
Some home coffee users really love to nerd out and explore different styles of distribution tools and techniques to extract maximum sweetness from the coffees they're brewing. If this is you, I love it! Great job.
For those who don't, no sweat – you can still make a tasty brew without all the tools. Try a few (3) gentle palm taps to spread the coffee to all corners of the basket to get it as evenly spread as possible before tamping your coffee.
This will allow the water to go through the coffee bed at the same speed, avoiding channelling and under-extracting the good stuff (sweetness) while over-extracting the bad stuff (bitterness).
Effective distribution vs In-effective distribution.
5. Tamp effectively
When tamping, it's vital your coffee is level and flat with consistent pressure, as we want the water to go through the coffee as evenly as possible to extract as many favourable elements as possible.
Simply press flat-down evenly with your tamper, and when you feel the coffee compress and push back on you, you're done. There's no need to push down hard, as this can often make your coffee more uneven.
Tamper: The tool with a handle and flat bottom used to press the coffee grounds flat into the basket.
Tamping: The action of pressing down the coffee grounds with a Tamper in the basket to make sure the water flows through evenly.
6. Weighing your espresso shot
Controlling the output of your espresso (yield) is the second piece of the puzzle when trying to achieve the same profile for your coffee. Simply grab your scales and place them on the drip tray of your coffee machine, place the cup you want your coffee in, on the scale and tare it off, then start extracting your coffee, turning off the shot 3 grams before your desired weight (27 grams for 30 grams or 33 grams for 36 grams).
Tare: Setting the scale to zero so it doesn't count the weight of the container, only what's inside it.
7. Nail your extraction time
Nailing your extraction time is the final step and will complete your recipe. We're aiming for around the 25-second mark for 18 grams of coffee and 27 seconds for 22 grams of coffee.
If your espresso is pouring faster than this, make a minor adjustment on your grinder to finer to slow down the brew time of your coffee.
If your espresso is pouring slower than our desired time, make your grinder slightly coarser to speed up your brew time.
Try not to make too big of an adjustment, as you can really throw your grinder out, and it can be very frustrating trying to re-dial it in.
By controlling all of these variables, you should be able to achieve the same experience at home as you receive from your favourite Coffee Club barista in-store.
Hot tips for milk and pouring!
Make sure you don't under-heat or over-heat your milk, or reheat milk. There's a sweet spot for milk, which is about 50-60 degrees. Ideally, 60 degrees suits all coffee drinkers.
When pouring your milk into espresso, try your hardest not to break the crema layer on top, as this can really change the sweetness, texture, and aftertaste of the overall cup.
Sounds weird, I know, but trust me – it makes a huge difference. And once you nail that style of pouring, you'll notice you start to just drop little hearts in your coffee without even trying!
Unbroken crema vs Broken crema (Yuck - Lacks strength & flavour).
I'll focus on milk texturing and pouring in my next blog, so keep an eye out in the coming weeks. Until then, good luck with adapting some of these new techniques when brewing your Three Stories™ coffee at home, and smash out some heart latte art for me, please! - Michaela
