A quintessential great cup of coffee is usually crafted by a knowledgeable (and often inked) barista who may not know your name but certainly knows your order. Don’t we love them? But there are lots of times we can’t hit our usual café for our usual order, so what then? Before you open that tin of instant (though more on that later), there are a few things you can do to make sure your next brew is good enough to stay home for.
Great coffee takes…great coffee!
Sounds obvious but it’s worth stating. The key step to a great coffee at home is to have great coffee available to make it with.
Our coffee roaster and trainers bang on incessantly about the importance of the freshness of Moonshine coffee and for good reason. That bag of beans you’ve had in the fridge for the last month closed with a loose rubber band that only just keeps out the drifting aromas of that cracking chicken korma simply won’t cut it. Your tasty cup of coffee needs properly sealed dry beans that are under four weeks old. And, yes, they should be kept in the cupboard and not in the fridge.
You see, coffee is a social bean with really low self-esteem - put it with other aromas and it’ll take on their character in no time, leaving all its tasty goodness and individuality behind.
Keep your coffee in the pantry, sealed tight after each use, and it’ll keep its true character all for you.
Ground fresh and ground right
The key is to have the right sized ground coffee for the equipment you are using. You’ll need a different grind depending on your brew equipment. For a stove top, you’ll need finely ground coffee. For your plunger or aeropress, you’ll need it ground big and coarse.
The reason for grinding finer or coarser? The water interacts with your ground coffee particles to extract a balance of flavours. Super fine coffee allows water to extract flavour really easily, and coarse coffee less so. If the water extracts too many flavour elements, or too little, the unbalanced result is unpalatable.
Remember your favourite barista? They have all the tools to hand to ensure the ground coffee is perfectly suited to extracting superbly balanced flavours. It’s no accident - they know exactly what they are doing, over and again.
If you don’t know the best grind setting for your equipment, tell Moonshine’s expert team what brew gear you have at home and they’ll ensure your coffee is ground to the perfect size. You can do this in person at your local Moonshine outlet or when you order online.
Or, if you are super keen, explore getting a grinder at home that you can adjust to replicate what the Mooonshine crew already know.
In this case, size really does matter
Have you ever under-dressed for a big occasion? I once dressed for my cousin’s wedding in a pair of jeans and my cleanest tee. It wasn’t enough, not by a long shot. It’s the same with that morning cup of coffee when you put just one scoop in rather than two - you’ve kind of missed the dress code on the invitation.
Every time you portion out your coffee it’s essential to use the right amount for what you are about to make. If it’s three scoops into your stove top basket, don’t skimp. And likewise, packing it down and adding more will change the outcome more than you can credit. A set of scales (nothing fancy, but most come with an accuracy within 0.1g) will be of enormous benefit, and you will be killing it on the dance floor (so to speak).
How do you know how much to use? We are launching our E-Brew Book shortly as your perfect Moonshine brew guide.
Choose. Your. Weapon.
If you are making coffee at home using a stove top, stick with it and get really good at it. Try cold water in the bottom reservoir then, next time, try boiling the kettle and filling the stove top up with hot stuff to shorten the brew time. Ask yourself: what’s the effect on the flavour? Repeat and explore.
If a fancy V60 pour-over is more your thing, get yourself a 100 pack of papers, a set of scales and a gooseneck temperature-set kettle and crack on daily for the next three and half months, experimenting with different pour techniques and temperatures.
What we’re saying is that taking time to get to know your piece of equipment will lead to mastery of said equipment, and to some fantastic flavour results.
Too hard? Grab some Instant Moonshine.
No, we’re not kidding. We’ve had the Moon Runner Espresso Blend specially brewed and transformed into organic, locally roasted instant coffee that tastes so much better than the commercial stuff.
It’s for those afternoons when your favourite game’s on and the scores are close. Or before that morning surf when a change is due.
Until Moonshine’s Instant was created, we weren’t fans of instant coffee. But now? All we say is: Don’t knock it till you try it.
Is that it?
Of course not! You didn’t really think we’d give it all away at once, did you? We love your company too much.
How to get the best out of that stove top, pour over or plunger is still a land waiting to be explored.
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