It’s ridiculously tempting and easy to trot into one of Charlotte’s sundry coffee shops and order your favorite mocha-latte-cappu-frappe-espresso goodness, but what about those days when the success of your wake-up/mid-morning/post-lunch mug of Joe depends on your own brewing skills?
According to David Haddock of Boquete Mountain Coffee, the first coffee hot spot on this weekend’s CLT Coffee Crawl, these are his coveted coffee commandments for a five-star cup of Joe at home.
Commit
Find a roaster that you can trust. There are number of great roasters throughout the country. You just have to look for them. (Trust issue: Folgers uses scented extract to make your coffee actually smell like coffee and leaves it to stale for days before packaging it neatly for your consumption)
Measure
Use the right recipe. You have to balance the right amount of water that you want to turn into coffee with the amount of ground coffee you’re actually using. Multiply the amount of water — in ounces — by 0.057 to determine the amount of coffee you should use. (Overall, Americans usually concoct some pretty weak coffee.)
Turn up the heat
You have to have water that is hot enough. A Mr. Coffee at home is not going to get hot enough to effectively brew coffee ever in its entire life; it only goes to about 180 degrees. To make a good brew, it has to be within 195 and 205 degrees.
Grab a watch
The whole brewing process has to be for the right amount of time. Four to five minutes to be exact.
Baby it
After it’s brewed, coffee has to be held stable, like in a thermal container.
Protect it
Don’t ever put coffee in the freezer or refrigerator. Treat it like you would vegetables. Think of coffee as a very fragile agricultural product. You don’t buy salad at Harris Teeter and let it sit there for a week and eat it next week or even two weeks later — same thing on a micro level with coffee.
“Buy fresh, use fresh, buy often,” Haddock says.