A couple of months ago, I mentioned that I’d
started roasting my own coffee, and said that when my coffee
making ritual settled down, I’d do a better description of it.
The roasting doesn’t really add as much time as abandoning the
automatic coffee maker did, but in any case, except for the
grinding, it’s mostly time when
you’re free to putter around the kitchen, and if you cook at all,
you need to spend at least that much time every day puttering
around the kitchen. If you don’t, you can use the time to make no
knead bread. (More about that later. I just bought the book,
and my first batch is doing its second rising as I write
this.)
Normally I would give you links to Amazon, since I have an associate
account, and if you bought stuff by following my links, I would
get some money. In this case, they don’t seem to have any of my
exciting new coffee equipment, so I’ll just link you to SweetMaria’s, with whom I
have no relationship except that of a satisfied customer.
My coffee roaster is the Fresh Roast
Plus 8 coffee roaster, which I bought with the sampler of 8
different kinds of decaf coffee. They were all good coffee, but 3
stood out as the kind of coffee I especially like, so when I
finished the sampler, I ordered more of the ones from Costa Rica,
Ethiopia, and Sumatra. They also have a blend specially
formulated for making French Roast. This hadn’t been in the
sampler, but I wanted to try it, so I ordered some of that, too.
I generally like commercially roasted coffee best in the French
roast, but I think this isn’t true for home-roasted coffee, so
I’ll probably not repeat the French roasting experiment.
The coffee roaster makes three batches of the size I make these
days (about two mugs worth). So on a day when I need to roast
more, I put the tea kettle on to boil the water and put two large
scoops of coffee in the roaster and turn it on.
Then I grind the coffee for this batch in the Zassenhaus knee
mill.
The brewer I’m using these days is the Clever
Coffee dripper, which looks like a normal #4 coffee filter,
but has a valve on the hole in the bottom which is closed when the
filter is on the counter, but open when you put it on top of a mug
or thermos. This means you can grind the coffee as coarsely as
you like it, which makes the grinding easier than for a regular
filter, and then brew it in the filter, which makes the cleaning
easier than a French Press brewer would be.
Before putting the filter in the brewer, I rinse out the brewer
and make sure that opening the valve produces an enthusiastic
stream of water. Then I put the filter in the brewer, and put my ground
coffee into the filter.
When the water boils, I pour a little bit into the brewer,
and then wait while it wets the grounds, and then fill the cone up
and set the timer. I set it for 5 minutes these days since I’m
doing French roast, but when I’m doing a lighter roast I do it for
3 or 4 minutes.
When the timer rings, I put the brewer on top of my thermos and
wait for the coffee to drain into the thermos, pour myself one
mug, close the thermos to keep the second mug warm, and come upstairs
here to write my blog post.
One thing I especially like about this system is that I don’t
have any actual measuring steps at all. When the roasted
coffee beans are cool and ready to go into a jar, I take three
identical jars and eyeball putting equal amounts into each jar.
When I have boiling water, I just fill up the brewer.
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