Wire mesh coffee filters - help!

Poststructural Pub
21

UNPLUG the grinder before sticking your fingers in it!!!

I used one of those cheap whirly-blade grinders for a long time, but my granddaughter was able to get me a discount on the [u]Starbucks Barista burr grinder[/u]. It’s wonderful for drip coffee. It produces a fairly uniform grind, and is infinitely adjustable. It has a little container that the ground coffee goes into, and I’ve never had to clean it out. It’s a bit expensive, but it’s a joy to use.

In contrast, the blade grinders don’t really grind, they pulverize the beans, so that by the time you’re done, you have lots of super-fine powder, which often forms a cake in the bottom part of the grinder, and goes right through any metal filters.

Of course, I only use the Barista for drip (one-cup cone with paper filters). I have a real grinder, [u]the Rancilio Rocky (with doser)[/u], for espresso. The Rocky would be fine for drip, too, but I’m too lazy to switch settings and worry about cleaning it out when switching from one setting to another.

22

ok - since we’re now talking about HOW to make coffee…

What I’ve learned from our coffee folks:

A burr mill is WAY superior to a grinder. As Darwin stated, things like the Brun grinder don’t really grind the coffee, just mashes the heck out of it. You can also look more oils in a grinder than in a burr mill.

As for a filter, the gold filter again is WAY superior to any paper filter. Again, it’s those coffee oils, the paper absorbs some of these permanently, while the gold filter allows them to pass through to the brew.

Of course, fresh coffee (both freshly ground and freshly brewed) is way superior to slightly old coffee. The “ideal” way to make coffee is to grind it then brew it right away - there are volatiles that will leave the grounds if they sit overnight. The brew itself begins to loose volatiles as soon as it’s made - if you notice that some of the carmel notes aren’t there when you drink the brew, it’s because the furaniol volatilizes really quickly.

And it goes without saying - you should be drinking Millstone of Folgers!! :smiley:


Missy

23

Oh, no! :stuck_out_tongue:
(Sorry, Missy.)

I prefer roasting the coffee myself, and in small enough quantities that the roasted beans don’t sit for more than a week. My normal schedule is to do half a cup every other day. It takes about 20 minutes, most of which involves waiting through the roasting and cooling cycles. It’s pretty atuomatic, but you do have to keep an eye on it.

In addition to the vastly superior flavor of home-roasted coffee, it’s cheaper than the better pre-roasted stuff, and the variety of available coffees is staggering. Also, you can be sure you won’t be getting [u]Vietnamese robusta[/u] (which one expert described as “notes of rubber hose left in the sun inside a dead skunk”, though I understand that there is a steaming process that can remove much of the burnt rubber smell–then just add vanilla, cinnamon, chocolate, or almond extract, and you have a great beverage :roll: ).

My main source of green coffee beans is [u]Sweet Maria’s[/u]. Maria and Tom Owen are great to deal with, and Tom is a true coffee expert. They are also involved in promoting [u]Fair Trade coffees[/u].

Be careful, though, coffee and coffee equipment can be a bit like WhOA. I have three electric grinders, a Greek/Turkish coffee mill, three ibriks (for Turkish coffee), a roaster, an espresso machine with extra filters and portafilters, a half-dozen tampers, a French press, a drip cone, a drip machiine, a digital scale (in 0.1 gm increments), a milk pitcher, a wand thermometer (for the milk), espresso cups, cappuccino cups, latte cups, espresso shot glasses, and a drawerful of scoops and brushes.

The only reason I don’t have a vacuum brewer is because I’m just to darned lazy.

If you want to become obsessive about coffee (or if you already are), the guy who got me hooked, Mark Prince, has two sites, [u]coffeegeek.com[/u] ( general site with lots of product reviews), and [u]coffeekid.com[/u] (more instructional content). The coffeegeek site is kept more up-to-date, but there’s lots of good info on the other one.

24

Ah, Mike, there you go again! Right over the top, eh?

The grinder is defiantly a wanna thing. There is a compromise with the blade type and when to quit…

Denny

25

Obsession is my life. :party:

26

Coffee is wonderful. We buy a local roasting companies beans (The Roasterie). The guy started in his basement about 14 blocks north of me, but now they have a building and all and supply to a few grocery stores locally and most of our decent restraunts in town. We used to grind our own beans at home, but we’ve become lazy as of late and use the store’s grinder. :frowning:

Still, nothing beats good coffee…I wish I had condensed milk on hand - today would be a perfect day for vietnamese iced coffee.

Eric

27

hey Darwin, you wanna smell something REALLY bad??? Take that green robusta, add water to it, and boil it. Use some special glassware that captures the volatiles and combines them with boiling methylene chloride and have that mess go continuously for 90 minutes. Take the methylene chloride and evaporate it, while concentrating the volatiles, under nitrogen until you only have 100ul left, then inject 1ul of that onto an instrument and smell the volatiles that come off the end of the column! Which is basically what I do quite often at work.
You talk about FOUL!!! Methyl-isoborneal! YUCK!!! We get compounds that people give descriptors such as “sweat socks”, “wet dog”, “moldy earth”, etc.

And, like I said - I don’t even DRINK the stuff (I can’t taste bitter - so coffee just tastes really burnt to me).

Missy

28

I’ll have to look into the burr grinder- probably won’t get one at starbucks because they seem to charge premium price for everything from their coffee on up.

I really like the taste and the results of using a #4 melita paper cone in a single plastic cone holder. I’m sure some ‘coffee folks’ would disagree and prefer the gold filter but you’re probably not going to reach a concensus on anything so that’s ok. I heard though that the oils that the gold filter allow to pass through are potentially harmful health-wise. Where did I hear this? I believe it was the radio doc, Dr. Dean Edell. Perhaps there’s more info on this at his website, healthcentral.com I think it is. I’m not saying it’s true but that’s what I heard. For the same reason it’s supposedly not good to use a french press; the oils…

I like the whole food Allegro brand of coffee myself, in particular the Colombian although sometimes I’ll make up blends with 50% Colombo and equal parts of Kenya, Sumatra, Costa Rican for the rest. The dark roasts that most people seem to like I find too strong. That’s why I don’t like Starbucks although their lattes etc are great- the mocha carmel thing they have right now especially good. If I can’t get the whole food beans Seattles Best is quite good too except some places have it pre-ground only which I’ll pass on.

missy, Millstone? Let me guess… P&G? :laughing:

mike

29

I had a burr grinder but it died. Back to the blade and its okay.

I found, like others, that from the standpoint of using resources, I used more water rinsing out the dang gold thing than just chuckin’ the non-bleached paper filter with grounds into the compost (ratfood) heap.

I spent years trying to get coffee to taste and smell the way it does when you are sitting in a good restaurant awaitin’ a cup and comes to ya, all black and frothy. Bought the best beans, used the gold filter, had the burr grinder. NEVER could get it. Now if I could only justify knockin’ out a wall for a commercial Bunn brewer…THAT would do it!

Right. :laughing:

30

Sanctuary shade-grown, bird-friendly coffee, and a burr grinder. Cannot be beat.

31

Right, all the bad stuff starts seeping out as the grounds sit in the water. With a French press, the coffee sits on the grounds too long, absorbing the ickies. Percolated coffee is full of horrible stuff. That’s also why you should not run a second batch with used grounds.

I don’t know what it is about Starbucks, but even half a cup of plain gives me a migraine–the kind that lasts for days. Tastes like burned rubber to me.

I’m another fan of the Melitta #4 filter and a single-cup cone. It produces an excellent cup very quickly and without fuss. You just boil the water and pour it over.

Tried all sorts of beans and still came back to this:

or this:

Say what you will about freshly-ground, but the above is just plain old comfort. Like a cross between dark-roast coffee and hot chocolate. Mmmmmmm!

Even with that, I rarely drink coffee, so it’s a good thing it keeps well in the freezer.

Edited to mention that coffee with chicory contains less caffeine, because it contains less coffee. Even though you can stand the spoon upright in it, it’s still mild and mellow. Particularly if you drink it in the traditional fashion . . . half and half with hot milk.

Oh, now I’m hungry. I’ll leave you with this website of one of the most spectacular breakfasts on earth:

http://www.brennansneworleans.com/breakfastmenu.html

32

And, that’s part of why espresso is the very best.

Here’s something from Mark Prince:

"When you make an espresso in the proper fashion, you bring out all the best flavour colloids and oils and aromas into the cup (to find out what a proper espresso is, in the modern sense of the term and artistry, wait till next column).

When you do that 25 second pour, you don’t allow enough water exposure time to draw off the bitters that live inside roasted coffee. And surprise surprise, that properly made drink didn’t allow enough time to draw off very much caffeine, which is a very resistant chemical that doesn’t like to easily give up its home inside the ground coffee.

You heard me right: a properly crafted double shot of espresso has about one third to one quarter the caffeine content of a typical 12oz mug of Folgers. How is this possible? The brewing time is a big factor, but the beans are an even bigger one: high grade arabica beans, the kind of beans I use 90% of the time, have less caffeine than the beans typically used in Folgers, or Maxwell House, or most grocery store coffee - be it whole bean, ground, or instant. That bean is called robusta. Robusta has a lot more caffeine content than Arabica beans, but again, I’ll go into much more detail on this in another article."

You can read [u]the whole article[/u].

33

I’d have to do a blind, (double blind) taste test with a gold filter and a melita paper filter to see if the oils make the finished product taste better to me. I steered away from the gold filter because unless you grind the beans coarsly they will get through the filter and into the coffee. The reason I didn’t experiment with the coarsness of the grind much was I heard that the oils are not good for you, as I’d mentioned I’d heard from Dean Edell. I think it was something about raising your cholesterol but don’t quote me on that.

Darwin just mentioned the 25 second pour and I think he means with the Melita filter and this brings up another point when using these paper filters. Other than pre-rinsing the filter to remove the papery (sounds like a word in the news from the last week) taste, I’ve heard that initially you should just put about 2 tablespoons of hot water into the grounds to pre-soak them. Then in about 10 seconds or so slowly pour the rest of the hot water into the cone. I usually don’t do either but I’ve heard that is the best way to do it.

mike

34

It was.

.. . pre-rinsing the filter to remove the papery (sounds like a word in the news from the last week) taste, I’ve heard that initially you should just put about 2 tablespoons of hot water into the grounds to pre-soak them. Then in about 10 seconds or so slowly pour the rest of the hot water into the cone. I usually don’t do either but I’ve heard that is the best way to do it.
mike

It is.

35

No, that’s for espresso. The paper filters take a good bit longer than that for me. I’ve never timed them, though. (The espresso ideal is about 8 seconds for the coffee to start coming through, and another 16 seconds to get about one ounce of liquid. I have [u]pictures on my Web site[/u].

Other than pre-rinsing the filter to remove the papery (sounds like a word in the news from the last week) taste, I’ve heard that initially you should just put about 2 tablespoons of hot water into the grounds to pre-soak them. Then in about 10 seconds or so slowly pour the rest of the hot water into the cone. I usually don’t do either but I’ve heard that is the best way to do it.

The longer the grounds soak, the more caffeine and other bitter elements are released. The question is whether pre-soaking results in shortening or lengthening the overall process. I’d run some tests, but I’m all out of beans for drip.

36

I think it does lengthen it, just from experience. I had taken it that part of the reason to pre-soak was also that if you don’t you can get little dry clumps of coffee that end up not really getting the full benefit of the brewing process.

I’d imagine though the ultimate goal is to lengthen the overall soak time as you’d mentioned.

mike

37

The grains are encased in air. The air has to be displaced in order for the water to make contact with the surface of the coffee grain. If you don’t dampen the grains first, much of the water will rush by before the air has been displaced. Dampen them first, and the water follows water into all the nooks and crannies.

The grains also need to be hydrated if they are to release their goodies. If you dampen them first, they are already hydrated and they’re already beginning to “bleed” the good stuff by the time you pour the rest of the water over.

I think you can see this with a regular coffeemaker. The first water that comes through into the pot is, almost clear. The water is flowing between the grains, and the goodies in the grains aren’t in a water solution yet. If you dampen the grounds first, though, I bet it’s going to be darker sooner, because the water will contact the grains immediately AND the stuff in the grains is already in a water solution, ready to go.

Don’t put stock in that. I just made it up.

38

Peggy, Actually your explanation is both brilliant and concise. I just wonder where you were during the confusion that ensued on the ‘dry clumps in my pancake batter thread’? Correcting papers I presume?

mike

39

Just keeping up with the times.

40

Dry clumps in pancake batter??? When? Where? How could I have missed that!!!

Gee, here I am trying desperately to post for 3.5 people and I MISSED THAT?? I could have written for 10 on pancake batter!!!

Give me a subject that I have even a slight clue about, and I can go on for days. And I missed the pancake batter.

What rotten luck.

Did you, ah, ever find out what you needed to know . . . ?